There are places on Earth where if you can stand beyond the shadows’ reach of tree or building, you can see the sunrise and the set of a full moon simultaneously. At the southern tip of India is such a place. And since it was first noticed thousand of years ago, it was decided that to experience such an event would lead one into an auspicious day.
“The three musketeers” were to leave on the morning bus at ten fifteen. They had a schedule; I did not and planned to stay in Kanyakumari until the urge moved me. I was (and am) behind in writing, the cape would be a good place for me to stop and regroup. Therefore on my first wake-up, I was unpleasantly surprised to be brought out of sleep by the blaring prayer from a public address system. It was like taking a room too near a church with a full complement of bells and an ambitious bell ringer. But at five o’clock?
The boys burned energy like ferrets and should have slept in but having chosen a place to sleep this near electric vocal cords would bring them into consciousness. No coffee, no tea, just dress and go. The four of us followed a crowd shuffling down through the deep shadows of what had been a pitch black street last night. We in turn were followed by others. After a turn here and a twist there and dodging a postcard salesman and a dark-glasses vendor, we passed beyond the buildings and onto a road that ran down paralleling the beach. The only light came from a deep red splinter of cloud just above the horizon. It was still very dark, enough light to see the ground you walked over but not enough to make out what stood on two rock islands to the right of where the sun would in time rise. I lost my bet that I made with myself. The clouds had evaporated and we would have a clear sunrise.
The crowd stopped along the top of a retaining wall that kept the town and the road from slipping into the sea. The earlier people stood to our right and higher up while the arriving crowd along with us found a place along the road the wall held up. The town to our back, the Bay of Bengal before us, we waited and watched. By then I made out what looked like a temple crowned the farther rock but on the nearer one, there looked to be a great stone pillar. As time passed, the coming day showed the pillar to be the shape of a man Then as time went on, I could see a colossus his head probably more than two hundred feet above the sea. Any tourist with a half-well ordered mind would have read the guide book. Sometime it is to one’s advantage just to see, discover, and experience. The light in the east grew.
I looked back at the people along a wall above us, and behind them at the faces framed by windows, and by the figures high atop the hotels and on its balconies and marveled at how people had turned out just to see something as ordinary as a sunrise. The moon was out of sight. I don’t remember the phase but what I had earlier estimated to be hundreds of people now stood, at my guess, near two thousand, all watching, all waiting.
The boys, never still, always moving, had climbed down the wall and stepped along the rocks to get a closer look…at the sun? at the horizon? Strobes flashed all through the crowd. And by now the stratus formation was turning from orange to near gold. The waves lapped against another smaller wall at the water’s edge. Anthony had rock-hopped his way there and was wondering aloud back over his shoulder if they should charter a rowboat for a closer look. Since the horizon bends away from the viewer as he approaches and since the sun stands about ninety-three million miles away, I called to him that this was about as close as he would get.
Then as quietly as the crowd, it happened. The sun’s edge showed above the sea but if you looked quickly you saw that it rose in several parts with the lower part ragged like a crust nibbled by mice. Over the curvature of the Earth and far, far out to sea, possibly over Sri Lanka, cumulus cloud tops blocked part of the red arc. I had not seen them before and within seconds they disappeared into the building glare. They could have stood a hundred fifty miles or more from Cape Comorin. But by now the sun’s edge became one and rose slightly changing from a blood red to a brighter and lighter orange. Cameral clicked. Off to the right I could see both the temple that I would learn was a memorial and on the rock nearer the cape, the massive form, still a work in progress, of the Tamil poet, Thiruvalluvar.
Looking back at the people, I could see the saris take on colors in the brighter light. Then a family here and a person there withdrew from the front rank and walked back toward the passage between the buildings from where we had all come. Anthony and Avinash conferred with each other. The lenses retracted into their cameras. They asked Anil and I what we thought. It was breakfast time. The sun had risen.
#
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Sunday, November 25, 2007
To Kanyakumari at Cape Comorin
To Kanyakumari at Cape Comorin
During the first five or six weeks on the Subcontinent, there were days in which the temperature was bearable up to about noon. I’d heard of a place up in the Palani Hills called Kodaikanal, which was said to not only be bearable but actually cool. Settling down for a while was of more interest than sightseeing and I considered cutting across country to find the hill station. But then came that nagging question which was, When will you be back? Travel, like living, is cheap in India. One thought was to wait in the mountains until January and then come down and do my touring then. It was during January and February that I had crossed India the first time. I remember sweaters, not sweating. But then Cape Comorin, that is the southern tip of the country, was within a little more than a half-day’s journey so why not go? From what I’d read there was a strange phenomena to experience there, and while the sun and moon were not in sync, I was far enough south that I should take in the geography. Furthermore I’d heard about wind farms.
John Jacobs peddled hand-painted scarves to the hotel guests. He, like Tony, was proficient in English and operated as a small entrepreneur. I had seen him around the hotel several times and chatted with him. Now and then you meet an Indian who would like to take on the U.S. experience and John, who had few family ties and had cared for the elderly, had the American Dream in mind. The first hurdle is speaking English well enough so that the client can understand; the second is for the elderly to have the patience to learn John’s pronunciation.
I made him an offer that I’d give him $5.00 (Rs. 200) if he would transport me to the station and deal with the ticket agent. He was more than pleased.
The hotel clerks found a train leaving for Kanyakumari at 10:15 a.m. which would arrive at the southern tip of India that afternoon late. This suited me as I would have a chance to look over the countryside by daylight. Just to make catching a train more interesting there may be several stations in one town. John got the name of the proper station from the clerk and all was set for a morning departure.
He picked me up and we rode away in an auto rickshaw. At the ticket window, he turned and asked if I wanted an inexpensive second-class coach ticket or a sleeper ticket second class. Since I didn’t plan on sleeping, I bought the cheaper ticket and he helped me board. It was the wrong car but….. Then we shook hands, wished each other well, and I settled down to think over his advice. One mustn’t accept food from strangers. I think Mother told me that or maybe the advice only applied to candy. There had been cases of pranks played causing the recipient to become nauseated and in some cases the story included knock-out drugs and robbery.
I took a single seat on the narrow side of the car, the locomotive honked twice and we rolled along a trash-lined track and out into the farms and countryside. Urban areas are dumps. At this time India and America are dickering over a nuclear deal. Forget what the United States wants from India, if India can’t keep a power plant cleaner than it does a street corner, God help India! But the land, whether cultivated or wild, is as beautiful as anyplace in the world. I’m amazed that the tourist industry (Indian or foreign) hasn’t observed this. The land is Eden. The towns are the new Untouchables.
So the wind felt good coming through the window as we rolled south through Eden.
The first person sitting opposite to me was a man in his thirties, who could knew a few words in English. He wanted me to visit his home in days to come. I thanked him but told him that I would be taking another route. Then he asked me to sponsor him to come to the U.S. I told him that he’d need to go to school of which there were many in any city I’d been in and learn English. He thought that over and went on his way.
The next person to occupy that seat was a lady of about the same age, who had training, spoke well, and if I recall was in the medical field as were her friends sitting across on the wide side the aisle. We chatted and then passed a concrete pad of about thirty-five feet by better than fifty. There was a pole metal roof overhead and a good sized fire burning beneath the roof. I asked the lady what that was about. She said that it was a cremation. Not everybody can get to burning ghats of Varanasi. It could be that the ashes will reach the Ganges later.
The afternoon wore on. I managed to buy a bottle of water and with the help of the lady, I purchased a bag of Lay potato chips. These chips weren’t sliced and fried in Ft. Worth but instead were India’s own well spiced with curry powder. The lady left and three men in their twenties took seats in the car. They all spoke excellent English and I was invited to join them. They were interested in what I thought of India and one story led to another. They particularly liked pointing out this and that using my version of the Goan wrist flip and they though retraining cab drivers to become mercenary fighter pilots was hilarious. Then the conductors, two women, came round. I showed my ticket and they looked at me like my third-grade teacher did when I had committed a venial sin. It seems that John Jacobs had loaded me into the wrong car. I should have been sitting on wooden benches instead the plastic pads of a second-class sleeper. And like the third-grade teacher, they realized that I was utterly ignorant of my mistake and after informing me of my misdeed, they let it pass.
The young men were taking a few days vacation from their banking job in Bangalore. Two of them, Anthony and Avinash had known each other since grade school, the third, Anil, had known the two since college. They looked for the interesting and fun things to do. They had considered paragliding but due to the weather or faulty equipment or for some other reason they changed plans. They were on their way to Kanyakumari to see the sun rise. What ever turns you on. The bunch were live wires and curious, spending as much time as I, looking out the window. We had a discussion as to our location in relation to this west coast train to the Arabian Sea. Now in late afternoon, we agreed that the sun was to the west and if we were to see the sea again, it would be off the starboard since we headed south. To Anil looking over the Indian Ocean was a wonder that made the trip worth the time and effort. With my having lived twenty or thirty years on salt water, hearing the awe in his voice gave me something to think on.
Then the country and trees began to breakaway and beyond the coconut palms stood some of the most rugged mountains any of us had seen. Anil likened the sight to Utah. That took me by surprise that he would know what Utah looked like. Surely there weren’t many Americans who knew what Kerala looked like. I politely agreed although I’d have compared these rocky mountains with the Superstitions of Arizona. I wanted to point out one difference. Anil listened. “You must forget what you see in the foreground.” There were rice paddies stretching from the tracks to the mountains and the latter were five or ten miles away. Anil agreed that Utah wouldn’t have rice paddies.
Then we came to the terminal. This terminal was surely the end of the line. From here you double back; no left, right, or center.
Avinash spoke Tamil and was our chief interpreter. He dickered with the auto rickshaws and soon the four of us and our baggage were overloading a three-wheeler and chugging off to see what the hotels had to offer. Judging by the metabolic rate of these guys, I said that I wanted a room by myself. After a check of the available choice, we settled on rooms on the first floor (by British and Indian standards; second floor U.S.) and moved in. I showered and we met for supper. Indians, like the Chinese, order large quantities of food and then share. In my confusion, I ate most of a fish delicacy that they ordered. I though it was my order. They introduced me to a drink called “lassi.” The spelling varies as does the taste but I found a flavor with an untapped fortune just beneath the bubbles. I could imagine lassi stands popping up like fence posts, growing smaller as they stretched out over an American horizon. I got so many stories as to how it was made that I’ll stick with the one Avinash, who has probably never made the drink, told me. You dump yogurt into cold water and run it through a blender. The proportion should be just thin enough to be drawn through a straw. You add a little salt and a spoonful of sugar, if you like it sweet. Otherwise leave out the sugar and drink it salty to your taste. I wrote a glowing report to my daughter and she reminded me that we ate an Indian meal (complete with lassi) while sitting on some steps in Greenwich Village. I remembered the meal, my wrestling with some kind of dosi (great piece of crisp bread,) lunch time, rivers of people on Crosby Street, cars, all of which pretty well approximated India. I got stressed, daughter took it in stride, and Fred, her dog, which she carried with her, went to sleep. “And so we drank lassi?” I asked. Since she was about seven years old and that was thirty years ago, she puts little trust in my memory but that’s another story.
The Sea View Restaurant was a table cloth place. The young men would be gone by tomorrow night. But during my stay of several days, the waiters in white shirts, black ties and trousers got to know my weakness for lassi.
These three musketeers wiped their mouths on the cloth napkins and it was time to go look at the town. Of course by this time the sun had set over the Arabian Sea and there is nothing quite as dark as a tropical night. We wanted to find the “beach.” Again Avinash talked, took note, and away we went among vendors selling sunglasses, vendors selling strings of jasmine blossoms, vendors selling travel guides, but no vendor sold three foot long railway maps of India, which is about the only thing in the world I needed to purchase for a friend who loves maps so long as they don’t have too many towns shown on them.
We rounded one stand and found a brahma calf about half grown lying before a temple door. He was white but with gray, shading off to near charcoal. There are cows and there are cows but this one was a beautiful creature. Of course my gang was electronically prepared. They had come with I-pods, cell phones, and a digital camera. One by one we all had our picture taken with the calf. Anthony wasn’t too sure what would happen if he touched the calf. I couldn’t imagine an Indian made jittery by a cow but he and Avinash were Roman Catholics. Anil was Brahman. I petted the calf as I would a dog. You can charge my attitude up to my coming from a ranching family or my being Methodist-Heathen. This happened about a month ago and I haven’t seen such a beautiful animal since then.
We turned down the street which led to the “beach.” It also led to the great temple, which was part and parcel of this End of India/rising sun-setting moon thing. It was very dark. I said that I was turning back and the “boys” spun on their heels and came back with me. There manners all the time we were together were exemplary.
The last plan of the day was to get up early tomorrow and watch the sun rise over the Bay of Bengal. One of the last thing I did before I turned off the light in my room, was to go out on the balcony and look up at a starless sky. John Jacobs had told me with a giggle before he left me that morning. Most of the mornings in Kanyakumari are cloudy. Somebody was sure to be disappointed.
#
During the first five or six weeks on the Subcontinent, there were days in which the temperature was bearable up to about noon. I’d heard of a place up in the Palani Hills called Kodaikanal, which was said to not only be bearable but actually cool. Settling down for a while was of more interest than sightseeing and I considered cutting across country to find the hill station. But then came that nagging question which was, When will you be back? Travel, like living, is cheap in India. One thought was to wait in the mountains until January and then come down and do my touring then. It was during January and February that I had crossed India the first time. I remember sweaters, not sweating. But then Cape Comorin, that is the southern tip of the country, was within a little more than a half-day’s journey so why not go? From what I’d read there was a strange phenomena to experience there, and while the sun and moon were not in sync, I was far enough south that I should take in the geography. Furthermore I’d heard about wind farms.
John Jacobs peddled hand-painted scarves to the hotel guests. He, like Tony, was proficient in English and operated as a small entrepreneur. I had seen him around the hotel several times and chatted with him. Now and then you meet an Indian who would like to take on the U.S. experience and John, who had few family ties and had cared for the elderly, had the American Dream in mind. The first hurdle is speaking English well enough so that the client can understand; the second is for the elderly to have the patience to learn John’s pronunciation.
I made him an offer that I’d give him $5.00 (Rs. 200) if he would transport me to the station and deal with the ticket agent. He was more than pleased.
The hotel clerks found a train leaving for Kanyakumari at 10:15 a.m. which would arrive at the southern tip of India that afternoon late. This suited me as I would have a chance to look over the countryside by daylight. Just to make catching a train more interesting there may be several stations in one town. John got the name of the proper station from the clerk and all was set for a morning departure.
He picked me up and we rode away in an auto rickshaw. At the ticket window, he turned and asked if I wanted an inexpensive second-class coach ticket or a sleeper ticket second class. Since I didn’t plan on sleeping, I bought the cheaper ticket and he helped me board. It was the wrong car but….. Then we shook hands, wished each other well, and I settled down to think over his advice. One mustn’t accept food from strangers. I think Mother told me that or maybe the advice only applied to candy. There had been cases of pranks played causing the recipient to become nauseated and in some cases the story included knock-out drugs and robbery.
I took a single seat on the narrow side of the car, the locomotive honked twice and we rolled along a trash-lined track and out into the farms and countryside. Urban areas are dumps. At this time India and America are dickering over a nuclear deal. Forget what the United States wants from India, if India can’t keep a power plant cleaner than it does a street corner, God help India! But the land, whether cultivated or wild, is as beautiful as anyplace in the world. I’m amazed that the tourist industry (Indian or foreign) hasn’t observed this. The land is Eden. The towns are the new Untouchables.
So the wind felt good coming through the window as we rolled south through Eden.
The first person sitting opposite to me was a man in his thirties, who could knew a few words in English. He wanted me to visit his home in days to come. I thanked him but told him that I would be taking another route. Then he asked me to sponsor him to come to the U.S. I told him that he’d need to go to school of which there were many in any city I’d been in and learn English. He thought that over and went on his way.
The next person to occupy that seat was a lady of about the same age, who had training, spoke well, and if I recall was in the medical field as were her friends sitting across on the wide side the aisle. We chatted and then passed a concrete pad of about thirty-five feet by better than fifty. There was a pole metal roof overhead and a good sized fire burning beneath the roof. I asked the lady what that was about. She said that it was a cremation. Not everybody can get to burning ghats of Varanasi. It could be that the ashes will reach the Ganges later.
The afternoon wore on. I managed to buy a bottle of water and with the help of the lady, I purchased a bag of Lay potato chips. These chips weren’t sliced and fried in Ft. Worth but instead were India’s own well spiced with curry powder. The lady left and three men in their twenties took seats in the car. They all spoke excellent English and I was invited to join them. They were interested in what I thought of India and one story led to another. They particularly liked pointing out this and that using my version of the Goan wrist flip and they though retraining cab drivers to become mercenary fighter pilots was hilarious. Then the conductors, two women, came round. I showed my ticket and they looked at me like my third-grade teacher did when I had committed a venial sin. It seems that John Jacobs had loaded me into the wrong car. I should have been sitting on wooden benches instead the plastic pads of a second-class sleeper. And like the third-grade teacher, they realized that I was utterly ignorant of my mistake and after informing me of my misdeed, they let it pass.
The young men were taking a few days vacation from their banking job in Bangalore. Two of them, Anthony and Avinash had known each other since grade school, the third, Anil, had known the two since college. They looked for the interesting and fun things to do. They had considered paragliding but due to the weather or faulty equipment or for some other reason they changed plans. They were on their way to Kanyakumari to see the sun rise. What ever turns you on. The bunch were live wires and curious, spending as much time as I, looking out the window. We had a discussion as to our location in relation to this west coast train to the Arabian Sea. Now in late afternoon, we agreed that the sun was to the west and if we were to see the sea again, it would be off the starboard since we headed south. To Anil looking over the Indian Ocean was a wonder that made the trip worth the time and effort. With my having lived twenty or thirty years on salt water, hearing the awe in his voice gave me something to think on.
Then the country and trees began to breakaway and beyond the coconut palms stood some of the most rugged mountains any of us had seen. Anil likened the sight to Utah. That took me by surprise that he would know what Utah looked like. Surely there weren’t many Americans who knew what Kerala looked like. I politely agreed although I’d have compared these rocky mountains with the Superstitions of Arizona. I wanted to point out one difference. Anil listened. “You must forget what you see in the foreground.” There were rice paddies stretching from the tracks to the mountains and the latter were five or ten miles away. Anil agreed that Utah wouldn’t have rice paddies.
Then we came to the terminal. This terminal was surely the end of the line. From here you double back; no left, right, or center.
Avinash spoke Tamil and was our chief interpreter. He dickered with the auto rickshaws and soon the four of us and our baggage were overloading a three-wheeler and chugging off to see what the hotels had to offer. Judging by the metabolic rate of these guys, I said that I wanted a room by myself. After a check of the available choice, we settled on rooms on the first floor (by British and Indian standards; second floor U.S.) and moved in. I showered and we met for supper. Indians, like the Chinese, order large quantities of food and then share. In my confusion, I ate most of a fish delicacy that they ordered. I though it was my order. They introduced me to a drink called “lassi.” The spelling varies as does the taste but I found a flavor with an untapped fortune just beneath the bubbles. I could imagine lassi stands popping up like fence posts, growing smaller as they stretched out over an American horizon. I got so many stories as to how it was made that I’ll stick with the one Avinash, who has probably never made the drink, told me. You dump yogurt into cold water and run it through a blender. The proportion should be just thin enough to be drawn through a straw. You add a little salt and a spoonful of sugar, if you like it sweet. Otherwise leave out the sugar and drink it salty to your taste. I wrote a glowing report to my daughter and she reminded me that we ate an Indian meal (complete with lassi) while sitting on some steps in Greenwich Village. I remembered the meal, my wrestling with some kind of dosi (great piece of crisp bread,) lunch time, rivers of people on Crosby Street, cars, all of which pretty well approximated India. I got stressed, daughter took it in stride, and Fred, her dog, which she carried with her, went to sleep. “And so we drank lassi?” I asked. Since she was about seven years old and that was thirty years ago, she puts little trust in my memory but that’s another story.
The Sea View Restaurant was a table cloth place. The young men would be gone by tomorrow night. But during my stay of several days, the waiters in white shirts, black ties and trousers got to know my weakness for lassi.
These three musketeers wiped their mouths on the cloth napkins and it was time to go look at the town. Of course by this time the sun had set over the Arabian Sea and there is nothing quite as dark as a tropical night. We wanted to find the “beach.” Again Avinash talked, took note, and away we went among vendors selling sunglasses, vendors selling strings of jasmine blossoms, vendors selling travel guides, but no vendor sold three foot long railway maps of India, which is about the only thing in the world I needed to purchase for a friend who loves maps so long as they don’t have too many towns shown on them.
We rounded one stand and found a brahma calf about half grown lying before a temple door. He was white but with gray, shading off to near charcoal. There are cows and there are cows but this one was a beautiful creature. Of course my gang was electronically prepared. They had come with I-pods, cell phones, and a digital camera. One by one we all had our picture taken with the calf. Anthony wasn’t too sure what would happen if he touched the calf. I couldn’t imagine an Indian made jittery by a cow but he and Avinash were Roman Catholics. Anil was Brahman. I petted the calf as I would a dog. You can charge my attitude up to my coming from a ranching family or my being Methodist-Heathen. This happened about a month ago and I haven’t seen such a beautiful animal since then.
We turned down the street which led to the “beach.” It also led to the great temple, which was part and parcel of this End of India/rising sun-setting moon thing. It was very dark. I said that I was turning back and the “boys” spun on their heels and came back with me. There manners all the time we were together were exemplary.
The last plan of the day was to get up early tomorrow and watch the sun rise over the Bay of Bengal. One of the last thing I did before I turned off the light in my room, was to go out on the balcony and look up at a starless sky. John Jacobs had told me with a giggle before he left me that morning. Most of the mornings in Kanyakumari are cloudy. Somebody was sure to be disappointed.
#
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Into the Backwaters for Sure
Into the Backwaters for Sure
When I awoke the morning after the strike, I looked down on the street and could find no more evidence of a protest that the exact site of a sand castle which stood previous to the last high tide. People moved in crowds; vehicle horns chattered back in forth, each, like there operator, more adapt at talking than listening.
As expected, the jeans were still wet so after a drenching with one-temperature-will-serve-all tap water shower, I pulled on my best dress pants with yellow stitching and found breakfast and directions to the government tourist ticket center.
In a number of countries in Asia, especially the ones where it rains and rains, they dig a ditch and line it with concrete to take away the excessive rainwater. Since flow depends on slope, I’ve always wanted to talk this design over with an engineer. In the final result does the depth of the slit carry more water than a gutter with a better slope? The cut is no more than a foot wide and of a depth of over a foot. In Singapore the depth could be more than six feet. Some places cover their gutters; Singapore doesn’t or didn’t. The gutter covers, when you find them, are rectangles of concrete, of course, wider than the gutter, about two and a half feet long and five or six inches thick. This makes them heavy enough so that it takes a concerted effort to move one. There is a keyhole molded through the slab, which serves more than one purpose, I suspect. One, a line with a toggle could be slipped through the hole, the toggle turned crosswise to the keyhole, the other end of the rope could be centered on the middle of a pole, and four men, two on each end of the pole, could lift and set the cover in place over the gutter. Now the slab serves as both a cover for the slit, a filter to keep larger rubbish out of the gutter, and the public can use the slabs as a fairly smooth sidewalk, albeit a narrow one.
As I hurried on, I walked the slabs until I came to one that was missing and then I took a long step over the hole. Before traveling to Asia be sure and get a tetanus shot and a Mini-Mag flashlight. You may wonder as to the present location of the missing slab (or if there ever was one) as you ask directions to the ticket office. And if you again visit the city years from now, remember, a tetanus shot and a Mini-Mag flashlight. The missing link in the walkway may still be missing.
The agent explained as he sold tickets that the beginning point was a cab drive away and that the price of the cab was covered in the ticket. A retired colonel was there with his wife, son, who was a lieutenant colonel, his daughter-in-law, there six-year old son. While the tickets and the money were being sorted, the two colonels studied the wall map talking over routes to be taken in the days to come. They were from the north and had rented a car to make a thorough site-seeing trip of it.
We boarded cabs and began the hour-long journey. There are two generalities I want to make and as you know generalities are not to be trusted. Nobody in India can make change in rupees and no taxi ever has a full tank. We stopped while about half-way to our destination long enough for a purchase of about four liters of gas and for me to launch one prayer from the backseat. It was during this outing that it occurred to me that there is a world supply of mercenary jet pilots among India’s cab drivers just waiting for further training. All they have to learn is how to make a plane go up and go down. With tongue out of cheek, these driver exhibit nerve and coordination that is well beyond that of normal humans. Of course all Indians have the nerve. They exhibit it every time they climb into a cab or onto a bus. But it is the drivers that have the lightning reflexes. And just to give further proof of their ability, they may carry on a conversation with a passenger, listen to Top Forty Mumbai at full volume, and answer a cell phone simultaneously. You remember at times like this that it’s tea, coffee, and beetle nut which is preferred over drinking alcohol. Like the survival of street dogs, in India the institution of road driving is Darwinian. So there I was in the backseat wondering if today is the day I find out who is the fittest to survive. As of late there is a move afoot by the government to train all commercial drivers. How can you argue with statistics? Five died along with two busses in a head-on. I just read the headlines so I don’t know the number hospitalized.
Because we stopped we were late. The others gathered beneath a palm thatched shelter waiting. My appearance upon stepping from the cab was enough to get them laughing and soon there was another hold up and we had time to visit and settle in with each other.
A little old man (probably my age) seemed to be in charge. His English was pretty good but it was Indian English. In my mind I had to pronounce what he said a second time to bring the words into American English. He was dressed like a villager but as you listened to him you knew he had been places and done things. I was to find that he was very knowledgeable and as you will see when dealing with people, carried around five pounds of patience.
He told us that we would see three villages and connecting waterways. We had arrived in the first village and he took us to see the horticulture, literally the things grown in the yard. Bananas and cocoanuts were not surprising but then he showed us black pepper, and a half-dozen other spices, along with coffee, cocoa, sugarcane, and tea. The yards seem to be the owners’ at-home supermarkets. Most of the spices he showed us, I had never heard of. The Phoenicians didn’t sail to this coast for the beaches.
Then we boarded a six-foot wide canoe of about thirty-five feet in length. To get an idea of the space, set two plastic lawn chairs side by side because that’s what we sat in. And before you restack them, check the name of the country of origin molded into the plastic. India is its own best customer. The colonel and I sat with each other, the grandson sat forward with the guide and a fellow who knew so much about what was around us that I was surprised that he came on the tour. I would have foregone the cab ride had I been him. He sat back of me. (And in case you have decided that my take on cab driving is exaggerated, I forgot to tell you that we hit something or somebody on the way out. It, he, or she knocked the outside rearview mirror out of position. I did hear a scream but I think it was mine.) The other family members were scattered along the length of the canoe. Then we shoved off, a man in the bow, and a man in the stern both poling. We moved silently except for the voices of the guide, the kid, and the fellow behind me.
The old man pointed out a water snake winding his way across the canal beneath a wild pineapple. The colonel said the snake was poisonous, the fellow behind me said it wasn’t, the kid talked Hindi to the guide, and the guide said nothing. You don’t eat wild pineapple FYI. It may have to be cultured for several generations before becoming nutritious. Regardless of the character of the water snake, false mangos are poisonous. And down the waterways we glided, doing nothing except listening and watching is a most pleasant way to spend a half-day.
A kingfisher perched on a limb up ahead. Everybody got quiet, even the kid and the man behind me. All wild animals have a danger range - the distance that they will allow you to approach them. Sometime they don’t know that you are there. If it is a kingfisher, you may see a wild flight. If it is a tiger or bear you may see a wild fight…in your lap. The kingfisher saw us coming and allowed us to get within about thirty-five paces and then flew straight down the waterway since there was less vegetation in that direction. Everybody including the kid, the authority, and me said, “Oooh!” at once. The kingfisher flew beneath leafed tree limbs that stopped all sunlight except for a few dapples here and there. Each time the daylight fell on the bird’s back, it fluoresced blue. Once you’ve seen the flash, you don’t get this bird mixed up with any other. He is about the same size as the kingfishers I saw around Sitka. A bottling company in Goa calls itself Kingfisher. When I saw their logo, I thought the company needed the advice of an ornithologist. How would anybody get a kingfisher mixed up with a ruby-throated humming bird? But while the artist may have exaggerated some, the bird is always worth stopping what you are doing to look at.
We poled past a rice paddy, then a stand of rubber trees, and then some bamboo. Everything in sight was lush and tropical – elephant ears, morning glory vines, hibiscus, and all this time we pushed our way through water hyacinths. I asked the guide about the latter, knowing that with a growth rate such as theirs, they can block a waterway quickly. The old guide said that once a year, the government enlists the people into a program to clear the waterway.
On the water or in visiting the villages that day, I noticed another program ongoing. Somebody told somebody that you don’t toss your rubbish the way they do it in town. I did see a small amount to garbage floating in the water, but really the water and landscape were clean. Since visitors drop in almost daily into these people’s midst, I’m sure there must be some financial benefits paid out by the government, possibly an improvement in the school or infirmary. If the local farming families paid any attention to us, it was generally positive. In one village they demonstrated rope making using corded coconut husks for fiber. I was tempted to buy a length but since it goes in the pack and the pack goes on my back, I passed.
At another hamlet, the ladies wove coconut palms into smartly executed mats. The lieutenant colonel bought two or three. He lives somewhere this side of Alaska and won’t need to stow them in the overhead compartment. While the weaving and the buying were going on, I walked off to investigate a whacking noise beyond a hedge of wild plants, which sounded like someone splitting firewood. Through the bushes, I first saw the little girl, probably about five years old. She flashed a smile and then I saw the mother who wheeled a hapless shirt overhead before smacking it hard against a rough rock. She smiled as well and said, “I washing!” I waved and kept the little girl’s attention by making a silver rupee disappear in my palm. The little girl knew that that couldn’t happen and her mother explained that I was doing magic. “Whack!” Mama never missed a beat.
Back in the boat we pushed on. The fellow behind me informed his group as to this or that. Not being able to understand a language is a great disadvantage except when you don’t want to listen. The kid forward questioned the guide, who while looking over the waterway and land around us, answered but with his attention elsewhere. The grandfather chuckled and I asked him why. He said that the boy was asking how many children the guide had and how long he had been a guide. I asked the grandfather if the boy intended offering the old man a job. Grand Dad thought that that was worth passing on in Hindi and he got a laugh. The questions and conversation had split early on. The adults wanted to know about the plants, animals, and the way of life while the boy wanted to know where the guide shopped for his sandals.
The water sent out concentric waves from the bank. I asked what had caused that and the colonel said that an iguana had dived beneath the water. I looked for hibiscus plants but couldn’t see any at the moment. These pocket-sized dinosaurs include in their diet hibiscus blossoms.
Trekking may be exhilarating, but sitting quietly in a canoe while it is being poled silently through the still water has something to be said for it. I had put the taxi ride home out of my mind and as the canoe slid beneath the overhanging branches and the sunlight dappled the waterway ahead of us, I relaxed. And that’s not such a bad thing to do now and then.
#
When I awoke the morning after the strike, I looked down on the street and could find no more evidence of a protest that the exact site of a sand castle which stood previous to the last high tide. People moved in crowds; vehicle horns chattered back in forth, each, like there operator, more adapt at talking than listening.
As expected, the jeans were still wet so after a drenching with one-temperature-will-serve-all tap water shower, I pulled on my best dress pants with yellow stitching and found breakfast and directions to the government tourist ticket center.
In a number of countries in Asia, especially the ones where it rains and rains, they dig a ditch and line it with concrete to take away the excessive rainwater. Since flow depends on slope, I’ve always wanted to talk this design over with an engineer. In the final result does the depth of the slit carry more water than a gutter with a better slope? The cut is no more than a foot wide and of a depth of over a foot. In Singapore the depth could be more than six feet. Some places cover their gutters; Singapore doesn’t or didn’t. The gutter covers, when you find them, are rectangles of concrete, of course, wider than the gutter, about two and a half feet long and five or six inches thick. This makes them heavy enough so that it takes a concerted effort to move one. There is a keyhole molded through the slab, which serves more than one purpose, I suspect. One, a line with a toggle could be slipped through the hole, the toggle turned crosswise to the keyhole, the other end of the rope could be centered on the middle of a pole, and four men, two on each end of the pole, could lift and set the cover in place over the gutter. Now the slab serves as both a cover for the slit, a filter to keep larger rubbish out of the gutter, and the public can use the slabs as a fairly smooth sidewalk, albeit a narrow one.
As I hurried on, I walked the slabs until I came to one that was missing and then I took a long step over the hole. Before traveling to Asia be sure and get a tetanus shot and a Mini-Mag flashlight. You may wonder as to the present location of the missing slab (or if there ever was one) as you ask directions to the ticket office. And if you again visit the city years from now, remember, a tetanus shot and a Mini-Mag flashlight. The missing link in the walkway may still be missing.
The agent explained as he sold tickets that the beginning point was a cab drive away and that the price of the cab was covered in the ticket. A retired colonel was there with his wife, son, who was a lieutenant colonel, his daughter-in-law, there six-year old son. While the tickets and the money were being sorted, the two colonels studied the wall map talking over routes to be taken in the days to come. They were from the north and had rented a car to make a thorough site-seeing trip of it.
We boarded cabs and began the hour-long journey. There are two generalities I want to make and as you know generalities are not to be trusted. Nobody in India can make change in rupees and no taxi ever has a full tank. We stopped while about half-way to our destination long enough for a purchase of about four liters of gas and for me to launch one prayer from the backseat. It was during this outing that it occurred to me that there is a world supply of mercenary jet pilots among India’s cab drivers just waiting for further training. All they have to learn is how to make a plane go up and go down. With tongue out of cheek, these driver exhibit nerve and coordination that is well beyond that of normal humans. Of course all Indians have the nerve. They exhibit it every time they climb into a cab or onto a bus. But it is the drivers that have the lightning reflexes. And just to give further proof of their ability, they may carry on a conversation with a passenger, listen to Top Forty Mumbai at full volume, and answer a cell phone simultaneously. You remember at times like this that it’s tea, coffee, and beetle nut which is preferred over drinking alcohol. Like the survival of street dogs, in India the institution of road driving is Darwinian. So there I was in the backseat wondering if today is the day I find out who is the fittest to survive. As of late there is a move afoot by the government to train all commercial drivers. How can you argue with statistics? Five died along with two busses in a head-on. I just read the headlines so I don’t know the number hospitalized.
Because we stopped we were late. The others gathered beneath a palm thatched shelter waiting. My appearance upon stepping from the cab was enough to get them laughing and soon there was another hold up and we had time to visit and settle in with each other.
A little old man (probably my age) seemed to be in charge. His English was pretty good but it was Indian English. In my mind I had to pronounce what he said a second time to bring the words into American English. He was dressed like a villager but as you listened to him you knew he had been places and done things. I was to find that he was very knowledgeable and as you will see when dealing with people, carried around five pounds of patience.
He told us that we would see three villages and connecting waterways. We had arrived in the first village and he took us to see the horticulture, literally the things grown in the yard. Bananas and cocoanuts were not surprising but then he showed us black pepper, and a half-dozen other spices, along with coffee, cocoa, sugarcane, and tea. The yards seem to be the owners’ at-home supermarkets. Most of the spices he showed us, I had never heard of. The Phoenicians didn’t sail to this coast for the beaches.
Then we boarded a six-foot wide canoe of about thirty-five feet in length. To get an idea of the space, set two plastic lawn chairs side by side because that’s what we sat in. And before you restack them, check the name of the country of origin molded into the plastic. India is its own best customer. The colonel and I sat with each other, the grandson sat forward with the guide and a fellow who knew so much about what was around us that I was surprised that he came on the tour. I would have foregone the cab ride had I been him. He sat back of me. (And in case you have decided that my take on cab driving is exaggerated, I forgot to tell you that we hit something or somebody on the way out. It, he, or she knocked the outside rearview mirror out of position. I did hear a scream but I think it was mine.) The other family members were scattered along the length of the canoe. Then we shoved off, a man in the bow, and a man in the stern both poling. We moved silently except for the voices of the guide, the kid, and the fellow behind me.
The old man pointed out a water snake winding his way across the canal beneath a wild pineapple. The colonel said the snake was poisonous, the fellow behind me said it wasn’t, the kid talked Hindi to the guide, and the guide said nothing. You don’t eat wild pineapple FYI. It may have to be cultured for several generations before becoming nutritious. Regardless of the character of the water snake, false mangos are poisonous. And down the waterways we glided, doing nothing except listening and watching is a most pleasant way to spend a half-day.
A kingfisher perched on a limb up ahead. Everybody got quiet, even the kid and the man behind me. All wild animals have a danger range - the distance that they will allow you to approach them. Sometime they don’t know that you are there. If it is a kingfisher, you may see a wild flight. If it is a tiger or bear you may see a wild fight…in your lap. The kingfisher saw us coming and allowed us to get within about thirty-five paces and then flew straight down the waterway since there was less vegetation in that direction. Everybody including the kid, the authority, and me said, “Oooh!” at once. The kingfisher flew beneath leafed tree limbs that stopped all sunlight except for a few dapples here and there. Each time the daylight fell on the bird’s back, it fluoresced blue. Once you’ve seen the flash, you don’t get this bird mixed up with any other. He is about the same size as the kingfishers I saw around Sitka. A bottling company in Goa calls itself Kingfisher. When I saw their logo, I thought the company needed the advice of an ornithologist. How would anybody get a kingfisher mixed up with a ruby-throated humming bird? But while the artist may have exaggerated some, the bird is always worth stopping what you are doing to look at.
We poled past a rice paddy, then a stand of rubber trees, and then some bamboo. Everything in sight was lush and tropical – elephant ears, morning glory vines, hibiscus, and all this time we pushed our way through water hyacinths. I asked the guide about the latter, knowing that with a growth rate such as theirs, they can block a waterway quickly. The old guide said that once a year, the government enlists the people into a program to clear the waterway.
On the water or in visiting the villages that day, I noticed another program ongoing. Somebody told somebody that you don’t toss your rubbish the way they do it in town. I did see a small amount to garbage floating in the water, but really the water and landscape were clean. Since visitors drop in almost daily into these people’s midst, I’m sure there must be some financial benefits paid out by the government, possibly an improvement in the school or infirmary. If the local farming families paid any attention to us, it was generally positive. In one village they demonstrated rope making using corded coconut husks for fiber. I was tempted to buy a length but since it goes in the pack and the pack goes on my back, I passed.
At another hamlet, the ladies wove coconut palms into smartly executed mats. The lieutenant colonel bought two or three. He lives somewhere this side of Alaska and won’t need to stow them in the overhead compartment. While the weaving and the buying were going on, I walked off to investigate a whacking noise beyond a hedge of wild plants, which sounded like someone splitting firewood. Through the bushes, I first saw the little girl, probably about five years old. She flashed a smile and then I saw the mother who wheeled a hapless shirt overhead before smacking it hard against a rough rock. She smiled as well and said, “I washing!” I waved and kept the little girl’s attention by making a silver rupee disappear in my palm. The little girl knew that that couldn’t happen and her mother explained that I was doing magic. “Whack!” Mama never missed a beat.
Back in the boat we pushed on. The fellow behind me informed his group as to this or that. Not being able to understand a language is a great disadvantage except when you don’t want to listen. The kid forward questioned the guide, who while looking over the waterway and land around us, answered but with his attention elsewhere. The grandfather chuckled and I asked him why. He said that the boy was asking how many children the guide had and how long he had been a guide. I asked the grandfather if the boy intended offering the old man a job. Grand Dad thought that that was worth passing on in Hindi and he got a laugh. The questions and conversation had split early on. The adults wanted to know about the plants, animals, and the way of life while the boy wanted to know where the guide shopped for his sandals.
The water sent out concentric waves from the bank. I asked what had caused that and the colonel said that an iguana had dived beneath the water. I looked for hibiscus plants but couldn’t see any at the moment. These pocket-sized dinosaurs include in their diet hibiscus blossoms.
Trekking may be exhilarating, but sitting quietly in a canoe while it is being poled silently through the still water has something to be said for it. I had put the taxi ride home out of my mind and as the canoe slid beneath the overhanging branches and the sunlight dappled the waterway ahead of us, I relaxed. And that’s not such a bad thing to do now and then.
#
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Into the Backwaters
Into the Backwaters
The French couple came to conclusion that the three of us should check out several hotels and decide. It was about two o’clock which meant that I was slowly sweating myself to death. The auto rickshaw stirred the breeze and that certainly felt good.
The first hotel had a great looking lobby, which was enough to convince me and Nicole went in to check rooms. She came back saying that the rooms had either ceiling fans or for another hundred rupees we could get a room with air conditioning. I took a ceiling fan room as they did as well, their room being right down the hall. We decided that we should clean up and meet in the lobby and take the ferry over to Kochi, which is the old port.
By now I was becoming used to the unheated shower water. This being summer by my standards, the shower reminded me of a plunge in an unheated swimming pool. Yes, it’s a shock but only for a few seconds and then the water felt wonderful. I’d turn off the water, soap up, shave, and rinse off. Then I’d knock what water, I could, off with my hands and step out of the bathroom and beneath the ceiling fan. For a few minutes that day, I’d would enjoy being cool.
When we met in the lobby, we all felt better than when we arrived. The state of Kerala (pronounced CARE-a-la,) is famous for “backwater” scenery. There are natural canals and waterways in the countryside and the government and private companies run tours by canoes or rice barges there. The three of us inquired about the tour but just as the hotel clerk was about to call in for reservations, he remembered that tomorrow there would be a one day strike. About what? Why? Apparently it was to show solidarity with something or another and represent a challenge to the sitting government. Would there be demonstrations?
I’ve got a thing about demonstrations, in India as well as anyplace else in the world. One of my Bombay memories from my first trip was a burnt out car with a broken windshield where somebody’s head smashed into it. There was hair on the interior rear view mirror and as I said there was fire damage to seats and overhead upholstery. The fire was out but those in charge had not removed the car, which had been left at the side of the street. We asked what had happened and were told that a family, who were out driving, had encountered a crowd of demonstrators. Whether the family tried to get through the crowd or the crowd enveloped the car wasn’t clear. What was clear was that someone in the crowd dropped a burning match into the gas tank. The crowd leaned against the doors and watched. When the family found that the doors couldn’t be opened from the inside, they butted their heads against the windshield and rear window in a futile attempt to escape. The bodies were gone. Only a few strands of hair remained. I stay clear of demonstrations.
There was to be a march but not in Ernakulam or Kochi. Since my schedule had no limits, the loss of a day was no loss. I could use it for writing and it would give me a chance to wash some clothes. Guy and Nicole did have a schedule so we jumped into a auto rickshaw and off we went to change airline tickets. Humanity and machinery filled the road. If no one works tomorrow, what will happen to all this?
The airline office shared a building that housed the HDFC bank and if there had not been such a line of people, I might have tried to make a withdrawal at the ATM machine but I was riding on another’s shilling and passed up the chance. In only a moment the two of them were back in the rickshaw with plans altered and we drove back at the jetty a block from the hotel. There we caught the ferry across to Kochi.
The sun hung low over Kochi and the sea and the water reflected a sky and sun in the first stages of evening. On the ride over, husband and wife talked over the changes in their schedule, I assume since I don’t speak French. While they talked, I watched the water. The tide was running out and taking with it, islands of water hyacinths. Birds walked on the leaves poking their beaks down among the stems for small fish that seemed to think that they were in safe shelter.
My coming to Kochi had been a “put-the-finger-on-map” decision. I did my reading and reasoning as an afterthought. One, I knew that there would not snow here. I got that wish answered in spades. Two, I’d heard that the country was beautiful and green. Right again. Three, Kerala the state we were in, was famous for its cultural mixture that goes back centuries and was noted for the peace among the cultures. Jews and Moslems live together here as do Christians and Hindus. Four, Kerala, along with Himachal Pradesh, another of my destination, has the lowest crime rate in India. And my feelings may well have been different in mid December or early January but this was October. And had the ferry not have been moving, I would have been uncomfortable. I did wonder at what I was doing. In Mrs. Martin’s geography class, fifth grade, we learned that the closer you get to the equator, the hotter it gets. Well she said that almost sixty years ago and a lot can change in that time...and a lot stays the same.
We turned into the first restaurant we came to in Kochi. I ate more than was wise even with an appetite that had its beginning back in Goa. After supper we started off at a pace set by Guy for the fish market. The man, probably 65, had long legs and a flat belly. In order to keep up, at times I had to dogtrot. Sundown was approaching and we did have things to see that would no be seen in the dark. About a half mile on, we came to the fishing port. There were high ended boats tied up, an open fish market by the jetty, but what would catch most people’s eye were the tripods supporting the great dip nets. None were being “dipped” at the moment, probably because the tide’s running and the size of the floating weed patches driven past like evening clouds before an off-shore breeze. The nets measured 25 or 30 feet square. There was a time to dip and a time to sell and we made our way through the buyers and sellers. Guy found a fellow who knew a little French and was a football fan of some French player. The two of them had a great time kidding each other. I was curious as to the kind of fish they had to offer. One the fish I wanted to see, I’d eaten but had never seen whole and uncovered by gravy. In the western Indian languages, it was called “pom frit.” The fish was considered a delicacy but I don’t know how one could tell since when served up, the fish was bathed in strong sauce. I asked and they pointed out a fish with a disk shape. The meaty part was about the size of the palm. I wondered what he would taste like, washed, rolled in salted and peppered cornmeal and deep fried. I swallowed therefore it would have probably tasted good with or without a squeeze of lemon.
Another fish in the market surprised me. A friend from Wrangell, Alaska, Rod Brown, goes each year to Baja California to catch dorado or what the Hawaiians call mahi-mahi. Rod re ports the fish is a great fighter, an acrobat, and delicious. Apparently dorados circle the world. Either the species or the family has a blunt face, a high forehead, and a dorsal fin that as I remember runs from head to tail.
While Guy and Nicole joked and quizzed the fishermen, I looked out at the horizon. The boats, as I said had very high bows and sterns. While possibly thirty feet in length, the lines created by bow and stern looked to have fairy tale proportions. The sun lay low enough on the sea where a few miles out, I could see the shadows of great standing waves where the out going tide met the incoming swells. Anybody who crossed that zone would have a pitch and a buck before getting safely either out or into the bay. It was from that strip of nature that the boats got their unique design.
By now men, trees, and nets were fast becoming silhouettes against a molten sunset and we hurried back along the way we came, Guy leading out. After a ferry ride back to Ernakulam we bade a good night to each other and it would be a farewell. I looked forward to a catch-up day and they had their plans. Such is the life of the wayfarer. People are with you one day and you listen to them and rely on them and then the next day they are memory.
= = =
The strike was the first thing on my mind when I awoke. What would be different? How could the streets not be jammed with people dodging vehicular traffic, jumping potholes, walking around rubbish? Fortunately the hotel staff came to work and I ate an omelet, drank a bottle of water, and ended it all with a rich cup of coffee with hot milk. But from the moment I awoke and rolled out of bed, the street beyond my window was quiet. I was as excited as a kid after the first snowfall. I wanted to go outside.
The street was nearly empty. Now and then a motorcycle would rip by but looking both ways you could count the people in the street. I began walking. In many cities in India, the streets aren’t much but the blocks are large. So a walk around a block really is a walk. The vehicular exhaust after having drifted out of town during the night, had no been replaced but the streets still smelled of what got tossed, dropped, or left as evidence of relief. Nevertheless you could walk and not have to think of being hit by something with a motor. Of course this strike produced a quiet that was also unnatural. Not only was the sound of engines absent but the honking, announcing the presence of a vehicle, was absent. The walk still had one aspect of yesterday and the days before. While walking through many urban areas in India, one must always watch where one steps. Not because of animal or human waste, the streets and sidewalks resemble a war zone, except fortunately, there’s never been a war in these areas. It as if it is a practice drill against the day when roadways and walkways will be ripped, shelled, and uprooted. If there are not missing parts of the way, someone will stack building materials (gravel, sand, rock) on the way. Lacking that, a vendor will stretch the tie lines for his awning of blue plastic across the walk and secure them to stones the size of your head that he’s set out into the street, which also forms an impediment. Then at “curb side” assuming there is a curb, vehicles are parked. The long and the short is that you walk in the street with moving traffic. You can expect to be missed by bike, scooter, and motorcycle but by the time you reach the auto rickshaw and taxi size, who misses whom is an open question. Anything larger, especially trucks and buses, enjoy a place at the top of the food-chain. Today the streets were empty. The motor vehicles were hidden at home or at company quarters. Nevertheless, you watched that you didn’t turn an ankle or break a leg. This is not a western tourist talking. There seems to be a space in the local papers reserved for pictures and addresses as to some scandalous lack of street and sidewalk maintenance.
The Communist Party of India (CPI) has found a home in West Bengal (Calcutta) and Kerala. I saw posters everywhere. Marx and Engel were the more common icons. Lenin was pictured on many posters and I saw one that showed a likeness of Joseph Stalin. Mao? Not now but if the blue plastic tarps mean anything, the Chinese product is never far from sight. I had read where the CPI had wrought some improvements in health care and education but when I asked I’d hear, “They are all the same (meaning any of the parties.) They are all corrupt.” There then is a dismal statement as to Man’s ability to govern himself.
I got back to the hotel with leg bones in tact and took on the chore for the day. In Goa I had begun a routine where I soaked overnight the shirt and socks I’d worn the day before. Shorts were added in the morning. Because of the weather, wearing a tee shirt was out of the question except on washdays when I had no long-sleeved shirt to wear. So first up was scrubbing a collar and then working the soap down through the shirt. Next come the shorts followed by the socks.
Whether you get a shower head or not is a question to be answered when you inspect your room but you will always have a plastic bucket that holds about five gallons and one or more plastic pitchers of about a quart each, which if there are two, will be different colors. The basic Indian way of ablution is to fill the larger bucket with water and then ladle pitchers of water over one’s head. There are variations on a theme but without soap, towel, or scrub brush the bucket and pitcher make up the necessities. Because of the strike today, I would not travel on tomorrow. That meant that I had a longer time to dry out the cotton frisco jeans I had worn since, since, since New York. I carried a second pair of trousers which were thrift shop dress pants but the earlier owner had outgrown them and I wouldn’t admit the same. This led to some seam rips and I hadn’t found time to sew them up. So while the jeans soaked, I sewed. The bad light and my eyes were a match. I switched from black thread that matched the cloth to a yellow that I could see. That chore done, I turned to the jeans.
A bunch of years ago while scrubbing clothes next to a bore drain (an irrigation ditch that waters sheep rather than irrigates crops) in Queensland. Times were good and I purchased a number three washtub to do my laundry. While on my knees punching the clothes down in the hot soapy water, I had an idea. I dragged the washtub over to a small tree and twisted the tub back and forth allowing the bottom of the tub to rest right on the ground. I took off my boots, rolled up my pant legs, and stepped into the tub and onto the laundry. I held onto the tree for balance while I lit my pipe and had a look around to check out any kangaroos in the neighborhood while I tromped through the sudsy water. In addition to getting the laundry done, it was a great way to wash between the toes. Unfortunately there was only room in this bucket for one foot but soon the water turned dark and I hoped there was nothing alive in that bucket other than my foot. About two more trips through this exercise and I had wet but reasonably clean jeans!
Strike day produced some prose and after supper I fell asleep, and while I’d lost contact with Guy and Nicole, I had seen urban India without the packed streets. There is a question in my mind as to whether the strike was a show of unity of opposition or just an excuse to take a day off during the middle of the week. Looking over this piece I though about retitling it. But then what the heck, I’ll just blame it on the strike.
#
The French couple came to conclusion that the three of us should check out several hotels and decide. It was about two o’clock which meant that I was slowly sweating myself to death. The auto rickshaw stirred the breeze and that certainly felt good.
The first hotel had a great looking lobby, which was enough to convince me and Nicole went in to check rooms. She came back saying that the rooms had either ceiling fans or for another hundred rupees we could get a room with air conditioning. I took a ceiling fan room as they did as well, their room being right down the hall. We decided that we should clean up and meet in the lobby and take the ferry over to Kochi, which is the old port.
By now I was becoming used to the unheated shower water. This being summer by my standards, the shower reminded me of a plunge in an unheated swimming pool. Yes, it’s a shock but only for a few seconds and then the water felt wonderful. I’d turn off the water, soap up, shave, and rinse off. Then I’d knock what water, I could, off with my hands and step out of the bathroom and beneath the ceiling fan. For a few minutes that day, I’d would enjoy being cool.
When we met in the lobby, we all felt better than when we arrived. The state of Kerala (pronounced CARE-a-la,) is famous for “backwater” scenery. There are natural canals and waterways in the countryside and the government and private companies run tours by canoes or rice barges there. The three of us inquired about the tour but just as the hotel clerk was about to call in for reservations, he remembered that tomorrow there would be a one day strike. About what? Why? Apparently it was to show solidarity with something or another and represent a challenge to the sitting government. Would there be demonstrations?
I’ve got a thing about demonstrations, in India as well as anyplace else in the world. One of my Bombay memories from my first trip was a burnt out car with a broken windshield where somebody’s head smashed into it. There was hair on the interior rear view mirror and as I said there was fire damage to seats and overhead upholstery. The fire was out but those in charge had not removed the car, which had been left at the side of the street. We asked what had happened and were told that a family, who were out driving, had encountered a crowd of demonstrators. Whether the family tried to get through the crowd or the crowd enveloped the car wasn’t clear. What was clear was that someone in the crowd dropped a burning match into the gas tank. The crowd leaned against the doors and watched. When the family found that the doors couldn’t be opened from the inside, they butted their heads against the windshield and rear window in a futile attempt to escape. The bodies were gone. Only a few strands of hair remained. I stay clear of demonstrations.
There was to be a march but not in Ernakulam or Kochi. Since my schedule had no limits, the loss of a day was no loss. I could use it for writing and it would give me a chance to wash some clothes. Guy and Nicole did have a schedule so we jumped into a auto rickshaw and off we went to change airline tickets. Humanity and machinery filled the road. If no one works tomorrow, what will happen to all this?
The airline office shared a building that housed the HDFC bank and if there had not been such a line of people, I might have tried to make a withdrawal at the ATM machine but I was riding on another’s shilling and passed up the chance. In only a moment the two of them were back in the rickshaw with plans altered and we drove back at the jetty a block from the hotel. There we caught the ferry across to Kochi.
The sun hung low over Kochi and the sea and the water reflected a sky and sun in the first stages of evening. On the ride over, husband and wife talked over the changes in their schedule, I assume since I don’t speak French. While they talked, I watched the water. The tide was running out and taking with it, islands of water hyacinths. Birds walked on the leaves poking their beaks down among the stems for small fish that seemed to think that they were in safe shelter.
My coming to Kochi had been a “put-the-finger-on-map” decision. I did my reading and reasoning as an afterthought. One, I knew that there would not snow here. I got that wish answered in spades. Two, I’d heard that the country was beautiful and green. Right again. Three, Kerala the state we were in, was famous for its cultural mixture that goes back centuries and was noted for the peace among the cultures. Jews and Moslems live together here as do Christians and Hindus. Four, Kerala, along with Himachal Pradesh, another of my destination, has the lowest crime rate in India. And my feelings may well have been different in mid December or early January but this was October. And had the ferry not have been moving, I would have been uncomfortable. I did wonder at what I was doing. In Mrs. Martin’s geography class, fifth grade, we learned that the closer you get to the equator, the hotter it gets. Well she said that almost sixty years ago and a lot can change in that time...and a lot stays the same.
We turned into the first restaurant we came to in Kochi. I ate more than was wise even with an appetite that had its beginning back in Goa. After supper we started off at a pace set by Guy for the fish market. The man, probably 65, had long legs and a flat belly. In order to keep up, at times I had to dogtrot. Sundown was approaching and we did have things to see that would no be seen in the dark. About a half mile on, we came to the fishing port. There were high ended boats tied up, an open fish market by the jetty, but what would catch most people’s eye were the tripods supporting the great dip nets. None were being “dipped” at the moment, probably because the tide’s running and the size of the floating weed patches driven past like evening clouds before an off-shore breeze. The nets measured 25 or 30 feet square. There was a time to dip and a time to sell and we made our way through the buyers and sellers. Guy found a fellow who knew a little French and was a football fan of some French player. The two of them had a great time kidding each other. I was curious as to the kind of fish they had to offer. One the fish I wanted to see, I’d eaten but had never seen whole and uncovered by gravy. In the western Indian languages, it was called “pom frit.” The fish was considered a delicacy but I don’t know how one could tell since when served up, the fish was bathed in strong sauce. I asked and they pointed out a fish with a disk shape. The meaty part was about the size of the palm. I wondered what he would taste like, washed, rolled in salted and peppered cornmeal and deep fried. I swallowed therefore it would have probably tasted good with or without a squeeze of lemon.
Another fish in the market surprised me. A friend from Wrangell, Alaska, Rod Brown, goes each year to Baja California to catch dorado or what the Hawaiians call mahi-mahi. Rod re ports the fish is a great fighter, an acrobat, and delicious. Apparently dorados circle the world. Either the species or the family has a blunt face, a high forehead, and a dorsal fin that as I remember runs from head to tail.
While Guy and Nicole joked and quizzed the fishermen, I looked out at the horizon. The boats, as I said had very high bows and sterns. While possibly thirty feet in length, the lines created by bow and stern looked to have fairy tale proportions. The sun lay low enough on the sea where a few miles out, I could see the shadows of great standing waves where the out going tide met the incoming swells. Anybody who crossed that zone would have a pitch and a buck before getting safely either out or into the bay. It was from that strip of nature that the boats got their unique design.
By now men, trees, and nets were fast becoming silhouettes against a molten sunset and we hurried back along the way we came, Guy leading out. After a ferry ride back to Ernakulam we bade a good night to each other and it would be a farewell. I looked forward to a catch-up day and they had their plans. Such is the life of the wayfarer. People are with you one day and you listen to them and rely on them and then the next day they are memory.
= = =
The strike was the first thing on my mind when I awoke. What would be different? How could the streets not be jammed with people dodging vehicular traffic, jumping potholes, walking around rubbish? Fortunately the hotel staff came to work and I ate an omelet, drank a bottle of water, and ended it all with a rich cup of coffee with hot milk. But from the moment I awoke and rolled out of bed, the street beyond my window was quiet. I was as excited as a kid after the first snowfall. I wanted to go outside.
The street was nearly empty. Now and then a motorcycle would rip by but looking both ways you could count the people in the street. I began walking. In many cities in India, the streets aren’t much but the blocks are large. So a walk around a block really is a walk. The vehicular exhaust after having drifted out of town during the night, had no been replaced but the streets still smelled of what got tossed, dropped, or left as evidence of relief. Nevertheless you could walk and not have to think of being hit by something with a motor. Of course this strike produced a quiet that was also unnatural. Not only was the sound of engines absent but the honking, announcing the presence of a vehicle, was absent. The walk still had one aspect of yesterday and the days before. While walking through many urban areas in India, one must always watch where one steps. Not because of animal or human waste, the streets and sidewalks resemble a war zone, except fortunately, there’s never been a war in these areas. It as if it is a practice drill against the day when roadways and walkways will be ripped, shelled, and uprooted. If there are not missing parts of the way, someone will stack building materials (gravel, sand, rock) on the way. Lacking that, a vendor will stretch the tie lines for his awning of blue plastic across the walk and secure them to stones the size of your head that he’s set out into the street, which also forms an impediment. Then at “curb side” assuming there is a curb, vehicles are parked. The long and the short is that you walk in the street with moving traffic. You can expect to be missed by bike, scooter, and motorcycle but by the time you reach the auto rickshaw and taxi size, who misses whom is an open question. Anything larger, especially trucks and buses, enjoy a place at the top of the food-chain. Today the streets were empty. The motor vehicles were hidden at home or at company quarters. Nevertheless, you watched that you didn’t turn an ankle or break a leg. This is not a western tourist talking. There seems to be a space in the local papers reserved for pictures and addresses as to some scandalous lack of street and sidewalk maintenance.
The Communist Party of India (CPI) has found a home in West Bengal (Calcutta) and Kerala. I saw posters everywhere. Marx and Engel were the more common icons. Lenin was pictured on many posters and I saw one that showed a likeness of Joseph Stalin. Mao? Not now but if the blue plastic tarps mean anything, the Chinese product is never far from sight. I had read where the CPI had wrought some improvements in health care and education but when I asked I’d hear, “They are all the same (meaning any of the parties.) They are all corrupt.” There then is a dismal statement as to Man’s ability to govern himself.
I got back to the hotel with leg bones in tact and took on the chore for the day. In Goa I had begun a routine where I soaked overnight the shirt and socks I’d worn the day before. Shorts were added in the morning. Because of the weather, wearing a tee shirt was out of the question except on washdays when I had no long-sleeved shirt to wear. So first up was scrubbing a collar and then working the soap down through the shirt. Next come the shorts followed by the socks.
Whether you get a shower head or not is a question to be answered when you inspect your room but you will always have a plastic bucket that holds about five gallons and one or more plastic pitchers of about a quart each, which if there are two, will be different colors. The basic Indian way of ablution is to fill the larger bucket with water and then ladle pitchers of water over one’s head. There are variations on a theme but without soap, towel, or scrub brush the bucket and pitcher make up the necessities. Because of the strike today, I would not travel on tomorrow. That meant that I had a longer time to dry out the cotton frisco jeans I had worn since, since, since New York. I carried a second pair of trousers which were thrift shop dress pants but the earlier owner had outgrown them and I wouldn’t admit the same. This led to some seam rips and I hadn’t found time to sew them up. So while the jeans soaked, I sewed. The bad light and my eyes were a match. I switched from black thread that matched the cloth to a yellow that I could see. That chore done, I turned to the jeans.
A bunch of years ago while scrubbing clothes next to a bore drain (an irrigation ditch that waters sheep rather than irrigates crops) in Queensland. Times were good and I purchased a number three washtub to do my laundry. While on my knees punching the clothes down in the hot soapy water, I had an idea. I dragged the washtub over to a small tree and twisted the tub back and forth allowing the bottom of the tub to rest right on the ground. I took off my boots, rolled up my pant legs, and stepped into the tub and onto the laundry. I held onto the tree for balance while I lit my pipe and had a look around to check out any kangaroos in the neighborhood while I tromped through the sudsy water. In addition to getting the laundry done, it was a great way to wash between the toes. Unfortunately there was only room in this bucket for one foot but soon the water turned dark and I hoped there was nothing alive in that bucket other than my foot. About two more trips through this exercise and I had wet but reasonably clean jeans!
Strike day produced some prose and after supper I fell asleep, and while I’d lost contact with Guy and Nicole, I had seen urban India without the packed streets. There is a question in my mind as to whether the strike was a show of unity of opposition or just an excuse to take a day off during the middle of the week. Looking over this piece I though about retitling it. But then what the heck, I’ll just blame it on the strike.
#
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
On the Train to Kochi
On the Train to Kochi
Remembering the incoherent soliloquy of the railway ticket agent I had to deal with in downtown Panaji, I hired Toni to get me to and on the train. I had a sleeper ticket clutched tightly in my fist but I had to catch the train in some station in the outlying areas many kilometers from familiar territory. The station was literally in a neighboring town.
Tony’s cab was very old and was resting somewhere a mechanic could rejuvenate it and so Tony hired Mike (no relation to Tyson, Tony assured me) and we set off for an hour drive through night and a thousand headlights pointed at us. Words fail me in describing traffic anywhere in India so I won’t. Although I will report that I saw no wrecks along the way. Once at the station, Tony checked on the where and when of the express and I would find, after he left, that the arrival would even be later than expressed by Tony.
The platform had a good crowd of people, vendors, and night-flying insects. If I recall, I had washed down with mosquito repellant and, since arriving in India, had taken a nightly pill of doxycycline hyclate, an anti-malaria medicine. Funny thing, I’m sure I copied the name off the bottle correctly but my spell check redlined the drug’s name. But anything that looked or bit like a mosquito made me super nervous. I was on my way into a land of standing water, rivers, lakes, and canals, and of course, malaria.
I said good bye to Tony and looking around I found a chart which matched sleeper car with platform position. I also met a French couple, Guy and Nicole, who were to be in the same car. We slung out packs on our backs and began to hike our way to the designated position. This would prove to be a very long train.
Guy retired from Air France and now having time and still in very good health in their sixties, they had decided to see more of India. Their first trip they had landed in Goa as a starting place. That was as far as they went. Goa holds the attention of quiet a few travelers. They come, look around, settle in, and stay.
The beaches are the draw. On one of our chit safaris, Tony drove me out to a beach. I walked down across the sand and looked out at a stranded freighter. Perhaps the ship lost power and drifted into the shallows rather than a pilot error of running aground. Now it was surely sanded in and there would be no way to refloat it. Only the insurance underwriters know. Tony said that the ship had been there for several years and from time to time a salvage crew comes by and cuts off “a hind quarter” and then moves on. The derelict is money invested, money made, money lost, and what you have left is junk. The junk collects faster than India can rid itself of it. The future of the country looks bright and trashed simultaneously.
We may have arrived too early in the day. Only elderly Europeans walked along the water’s edge in wading suits and I saw no one in the water. I walked down where the surf broke and smoothed the sand and I did feel a drop in temperature. To many people who live somewhere other than the coast, seeing the sea meet the sky, and I suppose, realizing the size and distance of each, fascinates them. One could rent a beach house here which was part of the idea. I had enough to keep me busy in town and the bus ride in and out to the beach would only complicate life.
According to what I heard and read, nude bathing has been the fashion here. Both my guide books argued strongly against the practice as it create a gallery of voyeurs. And in an age of cell phones, I would bet that a crowd could gather fast. I didn’t see anybody in my age group that I thought would be more interesting with clothes off than on and I didn’t feel like peeling so we followed the guidebook’s admonition and I turned round and walk back to the cab.
But now my new acquaintances, Guy and Nicole who were off to see more of India, and I waited for a late train. We were joined by a young Catalonian who was on his way to join up with his girlfriend of many years and a few months of estrangement. He spoke good English and proved to have a sense of humor. I told him about being so burned out on looking at Catholic churches that by the time I reached Barcelona, I wouldn’t budge when the tour bus pulled up near the Church of the Sacred Family and that I had to discover Gaudi many years later while prowling the library shelves in America. Wilde said something to the effect that, The problem with youth is that it is wasted on the young. In this case, the problem with tour guides is that they knew too little of local history and too much about one more church. The young man thought my plight amusing and we both agreed that I need another trip to Barcelona.
Amazingly, to me anyway, the train drew up and we boarded the correct car with as much dignity and as little dashing down the platform as one could wish for. Second class sleepers have an aisle a little off centerline and benched compartments of four bunks on one side of the aisle allowing the passenger to sleep “thwartship” while the other two sleep fore and aft on the narrow side of the aisle. A plastic covered pad served as a mattress and there was more need for open windows and electric fans mounted on the ceilings than there would be for sheets and blankets. The bunk’s surface reminded me of the sleeper bus’s bunks and I wondered how long it would take for me to scrub this shirt clean.
And so we all boarded and upon reaching my reserved seat, I found that I had broken into an on-going card game of a half-dozen adolescent boys. There was a little fold out table between the window seats and one of them was mine. If you buy a ticket (2nd class) you can wander the train and sit where ever you want…until the conductor finds you. That was what happened here. Second class lacked the table and offered wooden benches instead of the plastic covered mats for sitting. Except for the boys, I had the compartment to myself, then one by one, I lost them to possibly another empty sleeper compartment. I stowed my pack and briefcase beneath my bunk, opened both windows, made a pillow out of the coat my daughter bought for me, and while thinking whether there were anyplace in India cool enough to wear the coat, I fell asleep.
= = =
Ask any photographer and he’ll tell you that the early morning or late evening is the time to be out and about. The sun casts long shadows and by facing the sun, it’s backlighting create a dramatic picture. After a night of little sleep, my spirit and flesh took different paths. I did stay awake to watch early sunup for a few minutes. There is always a haze in India from cooking fires, dust from the streets, the water hanging in the air, and the LP fumes from the Mumbai taxis. I was now almost halfway between Cape Comorin, the south tip of India, and the road to the airport at Mumbai so I should drop the last cause and just say that the auto rickshaw, the scooters, the motorcycles, busses, cars, and the train on which I rode can locally bring on the same effect. The sun shown yellow-orange and against this the buildings and the forest of palms and wild trees silhouette themselves like standing shadows. Had there been clouds in the distance, I would not see them. They would be faded by haze.
Finally I did awaken. There was a woman sleeping on the bunk on the other side of the table. After sitting up, rubbing my eyes, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, and running my fingers a few times through my hair, I looked out the window at the passing forest and fields. I’ve heard that Malabar Coast has two monsoons. This place was so rich in plant life that it looked to have three. Water stood in the rice fields but also in long ponds along the track. Also in the fields cows grazed accompanied by one or more pure white egrets. The cow would stir fish or insect and the egret’s head darted like a rifle’s hammer, catching what a second before had enjoyed the safety of deception. There were long-stemmed daisy-like flowers with white petals and yellow centers standing tall in the water. Banana trees grew along peoples’ yards. Papaya trees (plants) outlined the gardens’ edge. Many of the trees were in flower.
A plan in nature is that each tree or plant has its own time to bloom and in that way there is little competition for the notice of pollinating insects. There were bright red orange blossoms of the color of a pomegranate blossom but as light and sight improved, the flowers turned out to be hibiscus. And the list of plant shapes and colors rolled on like this train down the track. Simply look again and a new species shows itself.
The diversity of plant life increases as you approach the equator but there are fewer numbers within the species (unless of course the plant is cultivated – the cocoanut palm for instance.) When the direction is reversed and you go toward the poles, then diversity dwindles and specimens increase representing each species. The Malabar Coast is a free-for-all as to different species. I saw a small elephant ear type of plant, which has a magenta center in the leaf. Any place, where decretive plants are marketed in North America, sells this plant often times to be grown indoors. A half hour passed and I saw another growing near a flooded ditch along the track. After that I saw no more.
Then we came to rivers and often there was a highway paralleling the railway. Over one river stood a neatly painted masonry bridge for auto traffic. At one end of the bridge in the water waded a white egret. The bird’s white seemed a color check against the white of the bridge.
The farmsteads were built of either stone or concrete. The hip roofs were tiled and while smoke and time turned the red to black, the rough surface of the tile catches enough dust to support lichen growth. The supersedure doesn’t progress to grass. One fairly common design was a hip roof over the central part of the house, then the eaves of the roof act to break the continuous line but below a lower roof following the same line of slope as above covers a surrounding veranda.
It being Wednesday, the children were off to school wearing scrubbed uniforms. Occasionally as we roll through a town, I saw a mosque. The girls’ heads were covered. The younger girls wore skirts cut just below the knees. The older girls’ skirts ended at the ankle. Since heat was never far from my mind, the girls looked as if they would become very uncomfortable if the day proved to be a steamer.
Watching the landscape pass by the window tires the eye and I laid down again for a nap. In a half-hour I awoke but kept my eyes shut.
“I was married at 16 and my husband passed away when he was only 49. I was then 29. From that time to this I am alone in the world with my daughter.”
I heard a man’s sympathetic grunt in reply. My compartment mate was awake and we had a visitor. With eyes open and spider webs of sleep impairing vision, I looked across at a middle aged man and woman visiting.
The woman went on. “My husband brought me to Goa as a bride and I have lived there ever since.”
“Where did you come from?” asked the man.
“From Portugal where I was born.” She went on to explain that she was Portuguese and became Indian through marriage. Be that as it may, dressed in a sari and having a dark completion, you would not notice a racial difference between her and any other Goan passenger. Somewhere back on the lower branches of her family tree, one or more ancestors migrated from the subcontinent to Portugal.
The lady was bright, had wit, and spoke English with only a few Anglo-Indian oddities in pronunciation. It is a good idea to learn and use the Indian pronunciation . When asked, “And from which country do you come?” An answer such as the United States or America simply stalls the progress of the conversation. But if you say, “Ah-med-de-cah,” immediately the conversation proceeds.
She asked me all about my family and like everybody else I’ve met, wonder why my family was not with me. I explain that my mother is 94 and has a hard time crossing a room. Having a young man frantically checking the direction of Mak-kah and then falling asleep on her shoulder would not be in any plan for her in the near future. My daughter had graduated from Columbia, had all her state certifications to practice medicine as a nurse practioner in New York State, and was job hunting.
“And your wife?”
I told her that my wife made the first crossing of India with me years ago but since then we’ve gone our separate ways. It’s as common as curry to be encounter what in the West we would consider a personal inquisition. In India it is simply getting onto information that in time I would probably include in conversation. And let there be no doubt about it, they are interested.
“I was married at 16 and my husband passed away when he was only 49. I was then 29. From that time to this I am alone in the world with my daughter.”
“Is that so?” I said.
While her family tragedy was sad, her husband seems to have left her well off. Her daughter received an education and held a responsible job in Ernakulam. The widow asked me what I was doing in India and I told her that I was looking over the country to see if there were anyplace I would like to stay for a month or a year or…. She told me about the virtues of Goa and I had no argument against her reasoning but told her that the heat was a little more than I had planned on.
“My husband brought me to Goa as a bride and I have lived there ever since.”
The Spaniard dropped in to talk over hotel plans. He had heard of a place which was very inexpensive and would I be interested in getting a room there?
There is or was an almost recognized sport in India, especially among foreigners. How far can you travel on how little? During the first trip across, we stopped in Bodhgaya, which is on the eastern side of the country and famous as the site where Buddha sat beneath the Bodhi Tree, meditated, and gained Enlightenment. We met a couple of Americans. These two guys would hitchhike and ride third class trains and by hook and crook, cross Pakistan, southern Iran, cut the corner of Iraq to get to Kuwait. There they would sell a pint of blood, rest up a little, and sell a second pint. And then make the return trip to Bodhgaya with money left over. I never heard why there was such a blood market in Kuwait and really they were not paying a lot for the blood, but it was the traveling on nothing that was the attraction. Good sport when you are twenty or thirty. At the moment I was hoping I’d find a room with no lizard droppings. And I expected to pay over Rs. 400, which is about ten dollars American. The price was surely within the limits of my budget. Below the Hotel Republica in Goa, there is a hole-in-the-wall called the Palace. The manager stayed drunk and the Pentecostals, beating a base drum, held prayer services in what in earlier days might have been a dining room. Seven nights in the Palace cost no more than three nights at the Republica but the rooms were dim, grim, and I’m sure sprinkled with lizard droppings. Not a good place for an old man, who has to sleep beneath a ceiling fan, and so while I found him excellent company, I passed on following his plan.
The widow’s daughter was at the station to meet her mother and so we all shook hands. She wore a bright yellow sari that caught the sunlight and , like her mother, seemed to be a delightful person but it was now approaching two p.m. when I wilt beneath the sun and my mind turned elsewhere.
#
Remembering the incoherent soliloquy of the railway ticket agent I had to deal with in downtown Panaji, I hired Toni to get me to and on the train. I had a sleeper ticket clutched tightly in my fist but I had to catch the train in some station in the outlying areas many kilometers from familiar territory. The station was literally in a neighboring town.
Tony’s cab was very old and was resting somewhere a mechanic could rejuvenate it and so Tony hired Mike (no relation to Tyson, Tony assured me) and we set off for an hour drive through night and a thousand headlights pointed at us. Words fail me in describing traffic anywhere in India so I won’t. Although I will report that I saw no wrecks along the way. Once at the station, Tony checked on the where and when of the express and I would find, after he left, that the arrival would even be later than expressed by Tony.
The platform had a good crowd of people, vendors, and night-flying insects. If I recall, I had washed down with mosquito repellant and, since arriving in India, had taken a nightly pill of doxycycline hyclate, an anti-malaria medicine. Funny thing, I’m sure I copied the name off the bottle correctly but my spell check redlined the drug’s name. But anything that looked or bit like a mosquito made me super nervous. I was on my way into a land of standing water, rivers, lakes, and canals, and of course, malaria.
I said good bye to Tony and looking around I found a chart which matched sleeper car with platform position. I also met a French couple, Guy and Nicole, who were to be in the same car. We slung out packs on our backs and began to hike our way to the designated position. This would prove to be a very long train.
Guy retired from Air France and now having time and still in very good health in their sixties, they had decided to see more of India. Their first trip they had landed in Goa as a starting place. That was as far as they went. Goa holds the attention of quiet a few travelers. They come, look around, settle in, and stay.
The beaches are the draw. On one of our chit safaris, Tony drove me out to a beach. I walked down across the sand and looked out at a stranded freighter. Perhaps the ship lost power and drifted into the shallows rather than a pilot error of running aground. Now it was surely sanded in and there would be no way to refloat it. Only the insurance underwriters know. Tony said that the ship had been there for several years and from time to time a salvage crew comes by and cuts off “a hind quarter” and then moves on. The derelict is money invested, money made, money lost, and what you have left is junk. The junk collects faster than India can rid itself of it. The future of the country looks bright and trashed simultaneously.
We may have arrived too early in the day. Only elderly Europeans walked along the water’s edge in wading suits and I saw no one in the water. I walked down where the surf broke and smoothed the sand and I did feel a drop in temperature. To many people who live somewhere other than the coast, seeing the sea meet the sky, and I suppose, realizing the size and distance of each, fascinates them. One could rent a beach house here which was part of the idea. I had enough to keep me busy in town and the bus ride in and out to the beach would only complicate life.
According to what I heard and read, nude bathing has been the fashion here. Both my guide books argued strongly against the practice as it create a gallery of voyeurs. And in an age of cell phones, I would bet that a crowd could gather fast. I didn’t see anybody in my age group that I thought would be more interesting with clothes off than on and I didn’t feel like peeling so we followed the guidebook’s admonition and I turned round and walk back to the cab.
But now my new acquaintances, Guy and Nicole who were off to see more of India, and I waited for a late train. We were joined by a young Catalonian who was on his way to join up with his girlfriend of many years and a few months of estrangement. He spoke good English and proved to have a sense of humor. I told him about being so burned out on looking at Catholic churches that by the time I reached Barcelona, I wouldn’t budge when the tour bus pulled up near the Church of the Sacred Family and that I had to discover Gaudi many years later while prowling the library shelves in America. Wilde said something to the effect that, The problem with youth is that it is wasted on the young. In this case, the problem with tour guides is that they knew too little of local history and too much about one more church. The young man thought my plight amusing and we both agreed that I need another trip to Barcelona.
Amazingly, to me anyway, the train drew up and we boarded the correct car with as much dignity and as little dashing down the platform as one could wish for. Second class sleepers have an aisle a little off centerline and benched compartments of four bunks on one side of the aisle allowing the passenger to sleep “thwartship” while the other two sleep fore and aft on the narrow side of the aisle. A plastic covered pad served as a mattress and there was more need for open windows and electric fans mounted on the ceilings than there would be for sheets and blankets. The bunk’s surface reminded me of the sleeper bus’s bunks and I wondered how long it would take for me to scrub this shirt clean.
And so we all boarded and upon reaching my reserved seat, I found that I had broken into an on-going card game of a half-dozen adolescent boys. There was a little fold out table between the window seats and one of them was mine. If you buy a ticket (2nd class) you can wander the train and sit where ever you want…until the conductor finds you. That was what happened here. Second class lacked the table and offered wooden benches instead of the plastic covered mats for sitting. Except for the boys, I had the compartment to myself, then one by one, I lost them to possibly another empty sleeper compartment. I stowed my pack and briefcase beneath my bunk, opened both windows, made a pillow out of the coat my daughter bought for me, and while thinking whether there were anyplace in India cool enough to wear the coat, I fell asleep.
= = =
Ask any photographer and he’ll tell you that the early morning or late evening is the time to be out and about. The sun casts long shadows and by facing the sun, it’s backlighting create a dramatic picture. After a night of little sleep, my spirit and flesh took different paths. I did stay awake to watch early sunup for a few minutes. There is always a haze in India from cooking fires, dust from the streets, the water hanging in the air, and the LP fumes from the Mumbai taxis. I was now almost halfway between Cape Comorin, the south tip of India, and the road to the airport at Mumbai so I should drop the last cause and just say that the auto rickshaw, the scooters, the motorcycles, busses, cars, and the train on which I rode can locally bring on the same effect. The sun shown yellow-orange and against this the buildings and the forest of palms and wild trees silhouette themselves like standing shadows. Had there been clouds in the distance, I would not see them. They would be faded by haze.
Finally I did awaken. There was a woman sleeping on the bunk on the other side of the table. After sitting up, rubbing my eyes, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, and running my fingers a few times through my hair, I looked out the window at the passing forest and fields. I’ve heard that Malabar Coast has two monsoons. This place was so rich in plant life that it looked to have three. Water stood in the rice fields but also in long ponds along the track. Also in the fields cows grazed accompanied by one or more pure white egrets. The cow would stir fish or insect and the egret’s head darted like a rifle’s hammer, catching what a second before had enjoyed the safety of deception. There were long-stemmed daisy-like flowers with white petals and yellow centers standing tall in the water. Banana trees grew along peoples’ yards. Papaya trees (plants) outlined the gardens’ edge. Many of the trees were in flower.
A plan in nature is that each tree or plant has its own time to bloom and in that way there is little competition for the notice of pollinating insects. There were bright red orange blossoms of the color of a pomegranate blossom but as light and sight improved, the flowers turned out to be hibiscus. And the list of plant shapes and colors rolled on like this train down the track. Simply look again and a new species shows itself.
The diversity of plant life increases as you approach the equator but there are fewer numbers within the species (unless of course the plant is cultivated – the cocoanut palm for instance.) When the direction is reversed and you go toward the poles, then diversity dwindles and specimens increase representing each species. The Malabar Coast is a free-for-all as to different species. I saw a small elephant ear type of plant, which has a magenta center in the leaf. Any place, where decretive plants are marketed in North America, sells this plant often times to be grown indoors. A half hour passed and I saw another growing near a flooded ditch along the track. After that I saw no more.
Then we came to rivers and often there was a highway paralleling the railway. Over one river stood a neatly painted masonry bridge for auto traffic. At one end of the bridge in the water waded a white egret. The bird’s white seemed a color check against the white of the bridge.
The farmsteads were built of either stone or concrete. The hip roofs were tiled and while smoke and time turned the red to black, the rough surface of the tile catches enough dust to support lichen growth. The supersedure doesn’t progress to grass. One fairly common design was a hip roof over the central part of the house, then the eaves of the roof act to break the continuous line but below a lower roof following the same line of slope as above covers a surrounding veranda.
It being Wednesday, the children were off to school wearing scrubbed uniforms. Occasionally as we roll through a town, I saw a mosque. The girls’ heads were covered. The younger girls wore skirts cut just below the knees. The older girls’ skirts ended at the ankle. Since heat was never far from my mind, the girls looked as if they would become very uncomfortable if the day proved to be a steamer.
Watching the landscape pass by the window tires the eye and I laid down again for a nap. In a half-hour I awoke but kept my eyes shut.
“I was married at 16 and my husband passed away when he was only 49. I was then 29. From that time to this I am alone in the world with my daughter.”
I heard a man’s sympathetic grunt in reply. My compartment mate was awake and we had a visitor. With eyes open and spider webs of sleep impairing vision, I looked across at a middle aged man and woman visiting.
The woman went on. “My husband brought me to Goa as a bride and I have lived there ever since.”
“Where did you come from?” asked the man.
“From Portugal where I was born.” She went on to explain that she was Portuguese and became Indian through marriage. Be that as it may, dressed in a sari and having a dark completion, you would not notice a racial difference between her and any other Goan passenger. Somewhere back on the lower branches of her family tree, one or more ancestors migrated from the subcontinent to Portugal.
The lady was bright, had wit, and spoke English with only a few Anglo-Indian oddities in pronunciation. It is a good idea to learn and use the Indian pronunciation . When asked, “And from which country do you come?” An answer such as the United States or America simply stalls the progress of the conversation. But if you say, “Ah-med-de-cah,” immediately the conversation proceeds.
She asked me all about my family and like everybody else I’ve met, wonder why my family was not with me. I explain that my mother is 94 and has a hard time crossing a room. Having a young man frantically checking the direction of Mak-kah and then falling asleep on her shoulder would not be in any plan for her in the near future. My daughter had graduated from Columbia, had all her state certifications to practice medicine as a nurse practioner in New York State, and was job hunting.
“And your wife?”
I told her that my wife made the first crossing of India with me years ago but since then we’ve gone our separate ways. It’s as common as curry to be encounter what in the West we would consider a personal inquisition. In India it is simply getting onto information that in time I would probably include in conversation. And let there be no doubt about it, they are interested.
“I was married at 16 and my husband passed away when he was only 49. I was then 29. From that time to this I am alone in the world with my daughter.”
“Is that so?” I said.
While her family tragedy was sad, her husband seems to have left her well off. Her daughter received an education and held a responsible job in Ernakulam. The widow asked me what I was doing in India and I told her that I was looking over the country to see if there were anyplace I would like to stay for a month or a year or…. She told me about the virtues of Goa and I had no argument against her reasoning but told her that the heat was a little more than I had planned on.
“My husband brought me to Goa as a bride and I have lived there ever since.”
The Spaniard dropped in to talk over hotel plans. He had heard of a place which was very inexpensive and would I be interested in getting a room there?
There is or was an almost recognized sport in India, especially among foreigners. How far can you travel on how little? During the first trip across, we stopped in Bodhgaya, which is on the eastern side of the country and famous as the site where Buddha sat beneath the Bodhi Tree, meditated, and gained Enlightenment. We met a couple of Americans. These two guys would hitchhike and ride third class trains and by hook and crook, cross Pakistan, southern Iran, cut the corner of Iraq to get to Kuwait. There they would sell a pint of blood, rest up a little, and sell a second pint. And then make the return trip to Bodhgaya with money left over. I never heard why there was such a blood market in Kuwait and really they were not paying a lot for the blood, but it was the traveling on nothing that was the attraction. Good sport when you are twenty or thirty. At the moment I was hoping I’d find a room with no lizard droppings. And I expected to pay over Rs. 400, which is about ten dollars American. The price was surely within the limits of my budget. Below the Hotel Republica in Goa, there is a hole-in-the-wall called the Palace. The manager stayed drunk and the Pentecostals, beating a base drum, held prayer services in what in earlier days might have been a dining room. Seven nights in the Palace cost no more than three nights at the Republica but the rooms were dim, grim, and I’m sure sprinkled with lizard droppings. Not a good place for an old man, who has to sleep beneath a ceiling fan, and so while I found him excellent company, I passed on following his plan.
The widow’s daughter was at the station to meet her mother and so we all shook hands. She wore a bright yellow sari that caught the sunlight and , like her mother, seemed to be a delightful person but it was now approaching two p.m. when I wilt beneath the sun and my mind turned elsewhere.
#
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Panaji, Goa II
Panaji, Goa II
Sixty percent of Goa is Christian and on Sunday you find out who isn’t. There is usually a small shrine in the establishment, draped in strands of fresh marigold blossoms and too there is a flame of some kind flickering before the image of the favorite god. If it is a restaurant you enter on Sunday morning, normally the place is vegetarian, although I’m not. But this is Rome and….
Indians adapt to there being more of them than will allow you the luxury of private space by sitting with you at your table. Try making eye-contact and you’ll find that you really aren’t there. They don’t share that kind of space. Not being unfriendly; more like another level of privacy that is affordable.
And so one Sunday morning, while sitting at a full table, a man across from me coughed. As if selecting my next crisis from a menu, I decided that I’d start coughing for a week or two. Two days later, it began and awakened me from a week’s worth of sleeps and generally made me feel weak and rotten. Several years ago, I had a many-week bout with bronchitis and this cough sounded familiar. The good news was that after five or six days, I realized that the cold would die and I would live. But then there was this other problem.
Abby, the nurse in New York who advised me to go on a liquid diet of mineral water but only if the bottle is sealed as tight as a coffin trans-shipping a body, had administered two of a three part series of shots for Japanese encephalitis. The final shot I was to get in Mumbai. Well, plans change but I did want the final shot for protection. As I remembered, your chances of surviving are about three in four but even if you did survive, what kind of life would you have after your brain had swollen well past the capacity of your skull? Think of a packed suitcase that you had to stand on to get shut. I decided Tony would know such things. He drove me to a nearby private hospital. The doctor explained that vaccinations were not administered there but at the public clinic…for free. My next question was whether they recycled needles and syringes. With a beatific smile, he explained that that was no longer done. Whether that included all of India, I was too busy thinking of other things to ask.
Tony drove me into the “city” to the clinic. I’d walked by the place several times without noticing it. So here was where I was to solve my problem. I paid Tony and told him I’d walk home, hoping that there would be no bad reaction. I then walked into a building which surely came from the Portuguese period and might qualify as historical. Remembering they don’t recycle needles, I entered a room with no patients but about eight men and women busy about their tasks – moving papers around.
There is a fact/myth (in India reality and belief often mesh like cog wheels would in the West) that anyone who graduates from high school does so with twelve years of English behind him or her. My rule of thumb is that if you see a man well-dressed walking down the street, chances are he knows where you are and how to direct you to your destination. The high school thesis was about to be tested.
“Hello, I would like to see about getting the third shot in a vaccination series for Japanese encephalitis.”
That jammed up the works. They all stopped freeze-frame. All that moved was that slowly their mouths opened in amazement.
Hmmm. I’m going to get a shot from one of eight high school drop-outs. Oh, you know how we are in the West. We put so much emphasis on education! And then I thought, I wish Rachel were here to give me the shot.
All establishments whether it be clinic or cab stand have a hierarchy and she, who was approaching middle age, took on my case. After repeating my request a time or two more, she found the words something like “No have” and made me understand “pharmacy.”
“Where is the pharmacy?”
“Hablilot (my word.)” And she folded her hand against her wrist and flung the directions out the door.
“Where is the pharmacy?” I thought I might get the specifics on a second try.
“Hablilot!” and the gesture became more pronounced.
“Where is the toilet?”
With this she all but became violent. “HABLILOT!” and she flung her hand with such force that she risked a sprain.
I left before causing any more trouble and walked down the street looking for the pharmacy. I searched all the way back to the hotel. The hot weather really drains you.
Next morning Tony and I conferred at the Hotel Venite over breakfast. I told him that I needed to go to a pharmacy. He knew a good one, dropping me off across the street from the clinic! But this time he came in with me, just in case there were no high school graduates working there.
While you wouldn’t mistake the place for a pharmacy in the United States, there was an air of business and no one seemed shocked when I spoke English. Tony had to move his cab and so I walked in and ask if I could sit down at the desk of the public councilor. He was an older man, small, well-fed, and with his lips pursed as if sucking on a cough drop, and did not want to be disturbed until the drop dissolved. Fine with me. Give me a chair and a breeze from a ceiling fan and I’m content to wait.
I had already talked to a Dutch girl who was doing an internship at the pharmacy and saw that some of the staff (my consultant included) wore white jackets with the establishment’s logo and “certified pharmacist” stitched on the pocket. The Dutch girl certainly seemed competent and I relaxed and waited until my consultant finished his cough drop.
“May I help you, sir?”
I explained the situation and he said that the “boss,” owner of the pharmacy, was in Mumbai and if contacted, he could bring the vaccine back to Goa with him. Then he went away to call a person with a cell phone and as with people all over the world with cell phones, he was either out of range or had his cell phone turned off. We are a species that likes to be heard but does not like to listen. No contact.
The saga of the vaccine extended over several days and while I can’t remember where this story came from, one version said that since the vaccine was expensive, that the World Health Organization bought it and distributed it to the effected parts of the world free of charge with the proviso that it will be passed on to those requesting it at no charge.
But while I waited I told him the story of what happened across the street the day before. He thought the story good enough to repeat to any employee who came within earshot and puttering around amongst his papers repeated “hablilot” to himself.
“You know that Goa is prosperous by Indian standards and many people come for employment from other places like south India (we were in south India but he meant further south) and they have little or no education,” he said in a slow and careful pronounced cadence. “Hablilot!” He squinted his eyes and chuckled again. It was good that he had finished his cough drop. He could have chocked.
I left Tony’s cell phone number for them to call when they heard from the boss and then I walked back to the hotel. Next morning Tony said he had received no word so we’d better go check. No, the proper connections were not made and there was no vaccine.
Tony thought of another place to try. We drove west to an area known as Campal. The houses were larger and had more space around them, which included some well-tended yards. The avenue was tree lined and if it were a cool day, it might be a good place to stroll for an hour. We turned off the road and into a narrow street and soon I talked to a pharmacist, who had a shop tucked beneath a hospital.
Tony was there with me incase there was any language problems. His multi-lingual ability almost put him on the floor when he learned that the single shot would cost $100 US! He couldn’t believe it. It was for that reason that the vaccine was hardly known of by ordinary people, drop-out, or graduate. I put a deposit down and the order was made to ship the stuff down from Mumbai. It was to arrive tomorrow and it did have to be refrigerated. So I paid the deposit and began worrying on the way back through the pretty avenue beneath the shade of the trees planted in another era.
Being pessimistic by nature and having an imagination, the two marry and I had to think about what I would do if the vaccine arrived in a paper bag in a bottle with a handwritten label? How would I know that it was the real thing rather than a couple of ccs of creek water with a little table salt mixed in for flavor? Do I just back out of the pharmacy and leave the deposit? How to know?
Tony had a tour lined up for the next morning but had time to drop me off and I would hire an auto rickshaw to bring me back. In I went with my back stiff with anxiety but the tension was for nothing. The vaccine was tucked in a cold pack. The box, directions for use, and bottle label were properly printed and the pharmacist set me up with an appointment to follow the doctor’s consultation. I sat in the hall on a bench and could hear the consultation through the closed door. The lady speaking was very upset about how some part of her life was going and talked nonstop to the hour and past. The cold pack kept the vaccine and my hands cool. Of course the cold pack condensed the water in the air and dripped between my fingers, forming a puddle on the floor. I had nothing else planned for the day. Then the door opened but the consultation continued. The lady wanted the doctor to understand just what a problem she encountered. He nodded and gently separated himself from her monolog by speaking to me. Fifteen minutes later and five dollars for a new syringe and needle and a doctor to administer the chilled vaccine, I walked out of the hospital relieved of a lot of worry and with the vaccination saved. I felt much lighter. There happened to be a bookshop back up the side street and on the main avenue. After browsing in the a/c atmosphere, I selected the Lonely Planet guide to India. It was a tome with a tome’s price but I needed something else to think about. With the medical business out of the way, I’d lost my excuse for hanging out in Goa. The truth is that I had began to feel at home there. The locals waved at me. I felt comfortable navigating the streets. I had learned where to shop and to get a suitable meal. But it was time to go on and I had the south coast to look over all the way to the tip of India. Time to move on!
#
Sixty percent of Goa is Christian and on Sunday you find out who isn’t. There is usually a small shrine in the establishment, draped in strands of fresh marigold blossoms and too there is a flame of some kind flickering before the image of the favorite god. If it is a restaurant you enter on Sunday morning, normally the place is vegetarian, although I’m not. But this is Rome and….
Indians adapt to there being more of them than will allow you the luxury of private space by sitting with you at your table. Try making eye-contact and you’ll find that you really aren’t there. They don’t share that kind of space. Not being unfriendly; more like another level of privacy that is affordable.
And so one Sunday morning, while sitting at a full table, a man across from me coughed. As if selecting my next crisis from a menu, I decided that I’d start coughing for a week or two. Two days later, it began and awakened me from a week’s worth of sleeps and generally made me feel weak and rotten. Several years ago, I had a many-week bout with bronchitis and this cough sounded familiar. The good news was that after five or six days, I realized that the cold would die and I would live. But then there was this other problem.
Abby, the nurse in New York who advised me to go on a liquid diet of mineral water but only if the bottle is sealed as tight as a coffin trans-shipping a body, had administered two of a three part series of shots for Japanese encephalitis. The final shot I was to get in Mumbai. Well, plans change but I did want the final shot for protection. As I remembered, your chances of surviving are about three in four but even if you did survive, what kind of life would you have after your brain had swollen well past the capacity of your skull? Think of a packed suitcase that you had to stand on to get shut. I decided Tony would know such things. He drove me to a nearby private hospital. The doctor explained that vaccinations were not administered there but at the public clinic…for free. My next question was whether they recycled needles and syringes. With a beatific smile, he explained that that was no longer done. Whether that included all of India, I was too busy thinking of other things to ask.
Tony drove me into the “city” to the clinic. I’d walked by the place several times without noticing it. So here was where I was to solve my problem. I paid Tony and told him I’d walk home, hoping that there would be no bad reaction. I then walked into a building which surely came from the Portuguese period and might qualify as historical. Remembering they don’t recycle needles, I entered a room with no patients but about eight men and women busy about their tasks – moving papers around.
There is a fact/myth (in India reality and belief often mesh like cog wheels would in the West) that anyone who graduates from high school does so with twelve years of English behind him or her. My rule of thumb is that if you see a man well-dressed walking down the street, chances are he knows where you are and how to direct you to your destination. The high school thesis was about to be tested.
“Hello, I would like to see about getting the third shot in a vaccination series for Japanese encephalitis.”
That jammed up the works. They all stopped freeze-frame. All that moved was that slowly their mouths opened in amazement.
Hmmm. I’m going to get a shot from one of eight high school drop-outs. Oh, you know how we are in the West. We put so much emphasis on education! And then I thought, I wish Rachel were here to give me the shot.
All establishments whether it be clinic or cab stand have a hierarchy and she, who was approaching middle age, took on my case. After repeating my request a time or two more, she found the words something like “No have” and made me understand “pharmacy.”
“Where is the pharmacy?”
“Hablilot (my word.)” And she folded her hand against her wrist and flung the directions out the door.
“Where is the pharmacy?” I thought I might get the specifics on a second try.
“Hablilot!” and the gesture became more pronounced.
“Where is the toilet?”
With this she all but became violent. “HABLILOT!” and she flung her hand with such force that she risked a sprain.
I left before causing any more trouble and walked down the street looking for the pharmacy. I searched all the way back to the hotel. The hot weather really drains you.
Next morning Tony and I conferred at the Hotel Venite over breakfast. I told him that I needed to go to a pharmacy. He knew a good one, dropping me off across the street from the clinic! But this time he came in with me, just in case there were no high school graduates working there.
While you wouldn’t mistake the place for a pharmacy in the United States, there was an air of business and no one seemed shocked when I spoke English. Tony had to move his cab and so I walked in and ask if I could sit down at the desk of the public councilor. He was an older man, small, well-fed, and with his lips pursed as if sucking on a cough drop, and did not want to be disturbed until the drop dissolved. Fine with me. Give me a chair and a breeze from a ceiling fan and I’m content to wait.
I had already talked to a Dutch girl who was doing an internship at the pharmacy and saw that some of the staff (my consultant included) wore white jackets with the establishment’s logo and “certified pharmacist” stitched on the pocket. The Dutch girl certainly seemed competent and I relaxed and waited until my consultant finished his cough drop.
“May I help you, sir?”
I explained the situation and he said that the “boss,” owner of the pharmacy, was in Mumbai and if contacted, he could bring the vaccine back to Goa with him. Then he went away to call a person with a cell phone and as with people all over the world with cell phones, he was either out of range or had his cell phone turned off. We are a species that likes to be heard but does not like to listen. No contact.
The saga of the vaccine extended over several days and while I can’t remember where this story came from, one version said that since the vaccine was expensive, that the World Health Organization bought it and distributed it to the effected parts of the world free of charge with the proviso that it will be passed on to those requesting it at no charge.
But while I waited I told him the story of what happened across the street the day before. He thought the story good enough to repeat to any employee who came within earshot and puttering around amongst his papers repeated “hablilot” to himself.
“You know that Goa is prosperous by Indian standards and many people come for employment from other places like south India (we were in south India but he meant further south) and they have little or no education,” he said in a slow and careful pronounced cadence. “Hablilot!” He squinted his eyes and chuckled again. It was good that he had finished his cough drop. He could have chocked.
I left Tony’s cell phone number for them to call when they heard from the boss and then I walked back to the hotel. Next morning Tony said he had received no word so we’d better go check. No, the proper connections were not made and there was no vaccine.
Tony thought of another place to try. We drove west to an area known as Campal. The houses were larger and had more space around them, which included some well-tended yards. The avenue was tree lined and if it were a cool day, it might be a good place to stroll for an hour. We turned off the road and into a narrow street and soon I talked to a pharmacist, who had a shop tucked beneath a hospital.
Tony was there with me incase there was any language problems. His multi-lingual ability almost put him on the floor when he learned that the single shot would cost $100 US! He couldn’t believe it. It was for that reason that the vaccine was hardly known of by ordinary people, drop-out, or graduate. I put a deposit down and the order was made to ship the stuff down from Mumbai. It was to arrive tomorrow and it did have to be refrigerated. So I paid the deposit and began worrying on the way back through the pretty avenue beneath the shade of the trees planted in another era.
Being pessimistic by nature and having an imagination, the two marry and I had to think about what I would do if the vaccine arrived in a paper bag in a bottle with a handwritten label? How would I know that it was the real thing rather than a couple of ccs of creek water with a little table salt mixed in for flavor? Do I just back out of the pharmacy and leave the deposit? How to know?
Tony had a tour lined up for the next morning but had time to drop me off and I would hire an auto rickshaw to bring me back. In I went with my back stiff with anxiety but the tension was for nothing. The vaccine was tucked in a cold pack. The box, directions for use, and bottle label were properly printed and the pharmacist set me up with an appointment to follow the doctor’s consultation. I sat in the hall on a bench and could hear the consultation through the closed door. The lady speaking was very upset about how some part of her life was going and talked nonstop to the hour and past. The cold pack kept the vaccine and my hands cool. Of course the cold pack condensed the water in the air and dripped between my fingers, forming a puddle on the floor. I had nothing else planned for the day. Then the door opened but the consultation continued. The lady wanted the doctor to understand just what a problem she encountered. He nodded and gently separated himself from her monolog by speaking to me. Fifteen minutes later and five dollars for a new syringe and needle and a doctor to administer the chilled vaccine, I walked out of the hospital relieved of a lot of worry and with the vaccination saved. I felt much lighter. There happened to be a bookshop back up the side street and on the main avenue. After browsing in the a/c atmosphere, I selected the Lonely Planet guide to India. It was a tome with a tome’s price but I needed something else to think about. With the medical business out of the way, I’d lost my excuse for hanging out in Goa. The truth is that I had began to feel at home there. The locals waved at me. I felt comfortable navigating the streets. I had learned where to shop and to get a suitable meal. But it was time to go on and I had the south coast to look over all the way to the tip of India. Time to move on!
#
Panaji, Goa I
Panaji, Goa I
When you go into any place new to you, there are always sights and sounds, smells and tactile sensations that takes getting used to and when I awoke the second morning, it was time to begin learning. I took a cold water (not very cold) shower and then asked Bosco, the hotel manager, where would be a good place for breakfast.
“Oh, the Hotel Venice. They serve everything you want.” And how do you get there? “Oh, just down this way. Five minutes. Just take the lane to the right.” And as he said that, he bent his hand down until his fingers nearly touched his wrist and then flipped hand and fingers in the general direction I needed to go as if he were liberating foreign matter from his fingertips. I hope that’s clear but do practice the gesture several times before incorporating into your conversation. It means almost nothing. Had Columbus got direction to India from an Indian using this wrist flip, the navigator would have surely discovered America.
I didn’t take the lane to the right. I walked off down the street for about three minutes and then asked directions again. “Hotel Venice?” they’d shake their heads. There were many restaurants but I wanted to find the one where I could order anything I wanted. Would they have an egg McMuffin with cheese? No, I didn’t hope for that but… I came to a street, road, alley turning off to the right. I would find that this was 31st January Street. I could find no one who knew what happened on 31st January but it made little difference because the street sign fell down many years ago. I suspect on following February 1st.
Down the way and on the left I saw a sign, “Hotel Venite.” I decided that that was Venice spelled in Portuguese. My Portuguese was better than I thought.
I climbed stairs to the “first” floor and took a table on one of the balconies. These were small extensions out from the wall. If I leaned back, one shoulder pushed against the wall while the other wedged against the railing. I don’t want you to get some idea of rampant luxury. It was after 9am, which means it was stand-still-and-sweat temperature. There might be more air moving along the outer wall of the building. Panaji is a very good place to play any sport that improves in still air. You can’t blame the wind on anything, including cooling off. The first thing I did was order the bottled water to see what happens next. While the waiter went to get the menu, I took a look around. Better to say, a feel around. Goa has the highest humidity that I can remember experiencing. In my twenties I went to sea, crossing the equator several times and tied up in back-water ports where nothing short of a typhoon would stir a breeze. But as I said, I can’t remember humidity like this. You can almost feel the weight of the water in the air. The water blocks your seeing a horizon. The gray air may be soaked with smoke but I vote for water. Probably a mixture of both but even swigging down bottled water, you don’t really cool. Goa is gaining fame as a tourist mecca. Why would anyone want to come to a place where it is this hot? North Americans go to Puerto Rico where along the coast the temperature probably rivals Goa but not the humidity. Stay home, buy a sunlamp, boil a pan of water, and turn the thermostat up to 100. But in Goa, the Office of Tourism points out that Goan beaches are some how different and that difference does not extend to downtown Panaji.
The menu said that they served cheese omelets. That sounded familiar, which when it comes to breakfast I appreciate, and so I ordered. One friend wrote asking me if I had tried any of the local dishes….this after two or three weeks of living in Goa. He travels on the other end of the visible spectrum from where I do. The stain glass would have intrigued him until he saw it and then he’d go looking for something more toward five star. And they would serve egg McMuffins with cheese.
The omelet arrived made of two eggs whipped, no milk, and a sprinkling of shredded cheese on the top. An egg by any other name… I dug in, downing water, and trying not to think about the sweat crawling like flies over my face and down my body. This became my standard breakfast, after having tried “sausage and eggs” at another café. I did add a couple of rolls on the side and I sprinkled sugar over the top of the eggs.
The eggs eaten I sipped the last of a liter of water and noticed across the street “Shruti Communications,” a cyber café. This became my “office”; the Venite, my second “house,” according to Funni, one of the waiters who needs an education. After breakfast each morning, I’d check and write emails at the office.
My office had a ceiling fan and intermittent 220. When the electricity would go off, I’d stand outside waiting for the power to return or for a breeze, which ever came first. The girl who was in charge for most of the time was small, dainty, and very careful not to “round off” the computer time to the house’s advantage. She wore saris and had quite a collection of them. She was always super clean and had a pleasant personality. I suspect that she was in her teens and should have been in school. It could be that academics didn’t interest her. She was the focus of interest of about a half-dozen young men who hung around the office. One of the advantages of my not knowing the local languages was that they never distracted me with their teasing her.
After emails I went back to the hotel, then set out to look over the town. The town backed up on a ridge to the south. One of the sixteenth century cathedrals topped this ridge. Somebody had to carry those building blocks to the top. I do hope it was winter. The stairs from the cathedral spill down to a long grassy place called Church Square. The square is level as is the town down by the water’s edge, perhaps a half mile away. Using the square as a starting point, my hotel was about two blocks east, the café another three blocks, then if you kept going you’d come to a creek which flows north into the Mandovi River (the northern boundary of Panaji.) Beyond the creek is the ticket office for the railway at the bus station. The town’s museum is also out there somewhere but one day I damn near cooked trying to find it. The near-death experience was made worthwhile by my meeting a very gregarious English teacher who told me that India was as much mine as his. And that we were all citizens of the world and that he wanted me to feel as much at home here as I would feel in my own country. With a billion plus people, I’m sure there are others like him here but I don’t think I’ll be lucky enough to meet another.
Back to the west from Church Square is “the city,” their word. While where I lived to the east part of town, the buildings had either falling down or were preparing to, “the city” is more modern. They have air conditioning. There are more upscale hotels and restaurants serving local food. Furthermore I believe that there are more banks in the city than liquor stores and churches in Nome. I walked over there about 2 pm and punched in my Wells Fargo ATM card and found, and this is a generalization, that unless your card has a MasterCard or Visa logo, it may work fine in New York, which mine did, but not in India. Of course I went into the bank where some people behind the desks would understand my problem. Most where too busy. That’s most. Not all. Some suggested that I try another bank, which I did again and again. It was getting onto two thirty, three in the afternoon and I’m walking through a well lighted steam bath. Some ATM parlors are air conditioned, some not, and if the ones that were not cooled happened to face south, you were essentially standing inside a solar panel. Two uniformed high school girls came in and tried to help but it was the card, not the technique. At one point as I went from machine to machine, I misplaced the card and thinking I’d lost it, I ran back to the last machine. The customer hadn’t seen the card and I dug deeper in my pocket and found the card.
Then I happened on a very nice lady named Elizabeth. One of my strategies was to apply for an ATM card at her bank. She very patiently explained “the law of the land,” as she called it. Without a permanent address in India, one could not apply for an ATM card. She made a counter suggestion. Why not have money wired out to me by Western Union? Rachel and I had signed a joint account and while I knew nothing of the charges, Evan would bird dog the information in New York. I was surprised at the reasonable cost. I think about it was about fifteen dollars per one thousand. And when you are standing here in the heat and you learn that there is a way to get money, the advice is calming. At one bank, a bank manager who also managed English well, walked me down the street, showing me where I could find Western Union. No flip of the wrist this time. While many employees were embedded in their own problems and ignored mine, there were people who would walk blocks out of their way to help you.
One of my first mornings while at breakfast on a balcony at the Hotel Vinite, I saw a young man sitting a few balconies down from me. We struck up a conversation and I found that he was a cab driver named Tony. He wanted to know where I wanted to go. I was waiting for some information to come in an email and while having enough cash to tide me over, there was nothing to do be to wait until Rachel came back to New York from a conference she attended out of town.
I had heard about Old Goa. The Portuguese early on had decided that they would build a head quarters, I think, about 8 km. from where we sat. The town was a failure. There was epidemic after of epidemic of cholera. But before they made the move back here, they built a huge pair of churches with a convent, a bishop’s house, and other buildings. One of the great churches was the final resting place of St. Francis Xavier. This early Jesuit father came out to raise the moral level of the colony (no word on success or failure) and to establish churches. Off he went building churches all over Asia. The number of churches, I never heard, but this was not a stay-at-home saint. He worked and because of it, I found him interesting.
So off we went. Tony asked if I would mind stopping at a “few” gift shops. The situation worked this way. Every time Tony brought in a prospective customer, he got a “chit.” Ten chits and he got so many minutes on his cell phone; double the chits and he even got a bigger number of calls. Over the next few days, I saw many gift shops, which proved to be both an experience on their own as well as gaining me some valuable information.
Walking through those doors and into the shops you entered another world and while still very much India, it was a wonderful change which extended beyond the air conditioning. The shops are spotless. The stock is set up to be shown off to its best advantage to the customer. The sales people (all the ones I talked to were from Jammu-Kashmir) spoke good English and were both knowledgeable and experts at sales. Many shops had gardens on their grounds. Not only was there no garbage strewn among the bushes, the grass was cut and edged. Several things caught my eye, small white marble boxes inlaid with colored stones, which usually made up an arrangement of flowers. The technique is the same as the inlay that decorates the Taj Mahal. Ganesh, the elephant headed god who removes impediments to your progress, is a favorite of the Hindus of Goa. This may be a unconscious statement on the conditions of the roads and sidewalks in Goa. The artistic treatment at expressing his appearance is liberal. Sometime the likeness is shown with a few watercolor brush strokes; other times the god will be shown in high detail and the statue stands four feet high.
The show really started with the carpets, all of which were made in Jammu-Kashmir. The salesperson talked about the number of knots per square inch and the durability of both run and color. I looked at the marvelous designs. One man showed me the handwritten instructions as to how a section of rug was to be made. I can’t tell you much more. There is in all likelihood something on the net which shows the finished works.
Two things other than goods I learned was. one: Jammu-Kashmir was not the trouble spot it is portrayed in the media and popular imagination. There was trouble but that was years back. There are a fleet of houseboats on Lake Dal by Srinagar waiting to be hired at all price levels…including mine! The other thing I learned was that “Plus,” the ATM company who issued my card through Wells Fargo, is honored at the HDFC Bank!!! Tony got his chits; I got cash! I’m sure that this isn’t the last chapter in the ATM crisis but the wolf turned and loped off to someone else’s door. HDFC has branches in many cities and while this information was a godsend, the name to remember is VISA.
#
When you go into any place new to you, there are always sights and sounds, smells and tactile sensations that takes getting used to and when I awoke the second morning, it was time to begin learning. I took a cold water (not very cold) shower and then asked Bosco, the hotel manager, where would be a good place for breakfast.
“Oh, the Hotel Venice. They serve everything you want.” And how do you get there? “Oh, just down this way. Five minutes. Just take the lane to the right.” And as he said that, he bent his hand down until his fingers nearly touched his wrist and then flipped hand and fingers in the general direction I needed to go as if he were liberating foreign matter from his fingertips. I hope that’s clear but do practice the gesture several times before incorporating into your conversation. It means almost nothing. Had Columbus got direction to India from an Indian using this wrist flip, the navigator would have surely discovered America.
I didn’t take the lane to the right. I walked off down the street for about three minutes and then asked directions again. “Hotel Venice?” they’d shake their heads. There were many restaurants but I wanted to find the one where I could order anything I wanted. Would they have an egg McMuffin with cheese? No, I didn’t hope for that but… I came to a street, road, alley turning off to the right. I would find that this was 31st January Street. I could find no one who knew what happened on 31st January but it made little difference because the street sign fell down many years ago. I suspect on following February 1st.
Down the way and on the left I saw a sign, “Hotel Venite.” I decided that that was Venice spelled in Portuguese. My Portuguese was better than I thought.
I climbed stairs to the “first” floor and took a table on one of the balconies. These were small extensions out from the wall. If I leaned back, one shoulder pushed against the wall while the other wedged against the railing. I don’t want you to get some idea of rampant luxury. It was after 9am, which means it was stand-still-and-sweat temperature. There might be more air moving along the outer wall of the building. Panaji is a very good place to play any sport that improves in still air. You can’t blame the wind on anything, including cooling off. The first thing I did was order the bottled water to see what happens next. While the waiter went to get the menu, I took a look around. Better to say, a feel around. Goa has the highest humidity that I can remember experiencing. In my twenties I went to sea, crossing the equator several times and tied up in back-water ports where nothing short of a typhoon would stir a breeze. But as I said, I can’t remember humidity like this. You can almost feel the weight of the water in the air. The water blocks your seeing a horizon. The gray air may be soaked with smoke but I vote for water. Probably a mixture of both but even swigging down bottled water, you don’t really cool. Goa is gaining fame as a tourist mecca. Why would anyone want to come to a place where it is this hot? North Americans go to Puerto Rico where along the coast the temperature probably rivals Goa but not the humidity. Stay home, buy a sunlamp, boil a pan of water, and turn the thermostat up to 100. But in Goa, the Office of Tourism points out that Goan beaches are some how different and that difference does not extend to downtown Panaji.
The menu said that they served cheese omelets. That sounded familiar, which when it comes to breakfast I appreciate, and so I ordered. One friend wrote asking me if I had tried any of the local dishes….this after two or three weeks of living in Goa. He travels on the other end of the visible spectrum from where I do. The stain glass would have intrigued him until he saw it and then he’d go looking for something more toward five star. And they would serve egg McMuffins with cheese.
The omelet arrived made of two eggs whipped, no milk, and a sprinkling of shredded cheese on the top. An egg by any other name… I dug in, downing water, and trying not to think about the sweat crawling like flies over my face and down my body. This became my standard breakfast, after having tried “sausage and eggs” at another café. I did add a couple of rolls on the side and I sprinkled sugar over the top of the eggs.
The eggs eaten I sipped the last of a liter of water and noticed across the street “Shruti Communications,” a cyber café. This became my “office”; the Venite, my second “house,” according to Funni, one of the waiters who needs an education. After breakfast each morning, I’d check and write emails at the office.
My office had a ceiling fan and intermittent 220. When the electricity would go off, I’d stand outside waiting for the power to return or for a breeze, which ever came first. The girl who was in charge for most of the time was small, dainty, and very careful not to “round off” the computer time to the house’s advantage. She wore saris and had quite a collection of them. She was always super clean and had a pleasant personality. I suspect that she was in her teens and should have been in school. It could be that academics didn’t interest her. She was the focus of interest of about a half-dozen young men who hung around the office. One of the advantages of my not knowing the local languages was that they never distracted me with their teasing her.
After emails I went back to the hotel, then set out to look over the town. The town backed up on a ridge to the south. One of the sixteenth century cathedrals topped this ridge. Somebody had to carry those building blocks to the top. I do hope it was winter. The stairs from the cathedral spill down to a long grassy place called Church Square. The square is level as is the town down by the water’s edge, perhaps a half mile away. Using the square as a starting point, my hotel was about two blocks east, the café another three blocks, then if you kept going you’d come to a creek which flows north into the Mandovi River (the northern boundary of Panaji.) Beyond the creek is the ticket office for the railway at the bus station. The town’s museum is also out there somewhere but one day I damn near cooked trying to find it. The near-death experience was made worthwhile by my meeting a very gregarious English teacher who told me that India was as much mine as his. And that we were all citizens of the world and that he wanted me to feel as much at home here as I would feel in my own country. With a billion plus people, I’m sure there are others like him here but I don’t think I’ll be lucky enough to meet another.
Back to the west from Church Square is “the city,” their word. While where I lived to the east part of town, the buildings had either falling down or were preparing to, “the city” is more modern. They have air conditioning. There are more upscale hotels and restaurants serving local food. Furthermore I believe that there are more banks in the city than liquor stores and churches in Nome. I walked over there about 2 pm and punched in my Wells Fargo ATM card and found, and this is a generalization, that unless your card has a MasterCard or Visa logo, it may work fine in New York, which mine did, but not in India. Of course I went into the bank where some people behind the desks would understand my problem. Most where too busy. That’s most. Not all. Some suggested that I try another bank, which I did again and again. It was getting onto two thirty, three in the afternoon and I’m walking through a well lighted steam bath. Some ATM parlors are air conditioned, some not, and if the ones that were not cooled happened to face south, you were essentially standing inside a solar panel. Two uniformed high school girls came in and tried to help but it was the card, not the technique. At one point as I went from machine to machine, I misplaced the card and thinking I’d lost it, I ran back to the last machine. The customer hadn’t seen the card and I dug deeper in my pocket and found the card.
Then I happened on a very nice lady named Elizabeth. One of my strategies was to apply for an ATM card at her bank. She very patiently explained “the law of the land,” as she called it. Without a permanent address in India, one could not apply for an ATM card. She made a counter suggestion. Why not have money wired out to me by Western Union? Rachel and I had signed a joint account and while I knew nothing of the charges, Evan would bird dog the information in New York. I was surprised at the reasonable cost. I think about it was about fifteen dollars per one thousand. And when you are standing here in the heat and you learn that there is a way to get money, the advice is calming. At one bank, a bank manager who also managed English well, walked me down the street, showing me where I could find Western Union. No flip of the wrist this time. While many employees were embedded in their own problems and ignored mine, there were people who would walk blocks out of their way to help you.
One of my first mornings while at breakfast on a balcony at the Hotel Vinite, I saw a young man sitting a few balconies down from me. We struck up a conversation and I found that he was a cab driver named Tony. He wanted to know where I wanted to go. I was waiting for some information to come in an email and while having enough cash to tide me over, there was nothing to do be to wait until Rachel came back to New York from a conference she attended out of town.
I had heard about Old Goa. The Portuguese early on had decided that they would build a head quarters, I think, about 8 km. from where we sat. The town was a failure. There was epidemic after of epidemic of cholera. But before they made the move back here, they built a huge pair of churches with a convent, a bishop’s house, and other buildings. One of the great churches was the final resting place of St. Francis Xavier. This early Jesuit father came out to raise the moral level of the colony (no word on success or failure) and to establish churches. Off he went building churches all over Asia. The number of churches, I never heard, but this was not a stay-at-home saint. He worked and because of it, I found him interesting.
So off we went. Tony asked if I would mind stopping at a “few” gift shops. The situation worked this way. Every time Tony brought in a prospective customer, he got a “chit.” Ten chits and he got so many minutes on his cell phone; double the chits and he even got a bigger number of calls. Over the next few days, I saw many gift shops, which proved to be both an experience on their own as well as gaining me some valuable information.
Walking through those doors and into the shops you entered another world and while still very much India, it was a wonderful change which extended beyond the air conditioning. The shops are spotless. The stock is set up to be shown off to its best advantage to the customer. The sales people (all the ones I talked to were from Jammu-Kashmir) spoke good English and were both knowledgeable and experts at sales. Many shops had gardens on their grounds. Not only was there no garbage strewn among the bushes, the grass was cut and edged. Several things caught my eye, small white marble boxes inlaid with colored stones, which usually made up an arrangement of flowers. The technique is the same as the inlay that decorates the Taj Mahal. Ganesh, the elephant headed god who removes impediments to your progress, is a favorite of the Hindus of Goa. This may be a unconscious statement on the conditions of the roads and sidewalks in Goa. The artistic treatment at expressing his appearance is liberal. Sometime the likeness is shown with a few watercolor brush strokes; other times the god will be shown in high detail and the statue stands four feet high.
The show really started with the carpets, all of which were made in Jammu-Kashmir. The salesperson talked about the number of knots per square inch and the durability of both run and color. I looked at the marvelous designs. One man showed me the handwritten instructions as to how a section of rug was to be made. I can’t tell you much more. There is in all likelihood something on the net which shows the finished works.
Two things other than goods I learned was. one: Jammu-Kashmir was not the trouble spot it is portrayed in the media and popular imagination. There was trouble but that was years back. There are a fleet of houseboats on Lake Dal by Srinagar waiting to be hired at all price levels…including mine! The other thing I learned was that “Plus,” the ATM company who issued my card through Wells Fargo, is honored at the HDFC Bank!!! Tony got his chits; I got cash! I’m sure that this isn’t the last chapter in the ATM crisis but the wolf turned and loped off to someone else’s door. HDFC has branches in many cities and while this information was a godsend, the name to remember is VISA.
#
Mumbai and South
Mumbai and South
The heat would be of no surprise to anyone except me. The earlier journey across northern India was done in about the last half of January and the full month of February, 1967. Sweater weather makes a coat fell good at times. October is short sleeve weather in Texas and as I walked across the paved parking lot, looking for my taxi, I certainly knew that I must now be much closer to the equator.
It seems that India society is a stack of managers. Somebody gets to tell an underling what to do and to do it now. Then underling passes the word down. Whether this parallels the cast system, I’ll learn in time but if you want to get a manager grumpy, give him a task and allow him to discover that there is no one beneath him. The buck has rolled down hill and landed in his lap. His people were not to be found. Everyone was on break.
I set my pack in the backseat and gave directions for him to take me to Victoria Terminal, which is the main railway station. Of course, they’ve changed the name since I last arrived there forty years ago but that made no difference as the driver was as old as I and we both remember the earlier name. I lowered the back windows looking for cooler air and the grump, reminding me of Charon, took his seat, glared back at the heat, and we drove along the highway to Mumbai.
I can’t remember when it began but I soon saw that the road wasn’t only a place to travel; it was a place to live. The children played at the edge of the road, the adults took up the space between the curb to about half way across the sidewalk and the remainder was a stall for selling or a shelter for living. Mile after mile there was a solid crowd. The road filled with vehicular traffic just missing each other. The taxis here use LP gas and it has an odor all their own, which mixes with the smells of two walls of people living within speaking distance of each other. They say that if you drink a glass of water in New Orleans that you are the sixth person to drink that water, since the rain fell in the river’s northern catchment near the Canadian border. Each breath I drew I’m sure had been exhaled by a half dozen people. Either that or that LP gas cooked the air before exhausting it. What a difference forty years and a half billion more people make.
In time we drew up at the station. Since it was formally named for Queen Victoria, you see architecture from a time long before this. They built big, rambling, and used the building materials’ color to make the building distinctive. I tipped the driver but I could see that his heart really rested with what intended to say to his charges, if he could find them when he got back to the airport.
No more than I walked into the dark of the building to get directions than a young man approached me to sell his services as interpreter, guide, and baggage handler. I waved him off. The station looked bigger on the inside and was naturally lighted by sunlight. It was also naturally cooled should a breeze blow through the window. Neither system worked worth a damn.
In order to be employed in either the steel industry or for the railway, you must be fluent in English. Cultural diversity is just fine for those peddling on the street but there will be no Tower of Babel when you’ve got an express train or a hot piece of steel coming at you. Now keeping in mind of my imperfect hearing plus my not having heard Indian English spoken to any extent, I could barely make out what anybody said to me. I walked from room to room and not drawing much in the way or assistance or even curiosity. Part of the problem was that it was Sunday afternoon and those (the ticket sellers) who could go home, did. “Tomorrow morning!” And furthermore I was in the wrong of the building. The young man was there again. “No thank you.” I luggage myself up a grand stairway and found some ladies who might rent me a “retiring room.” No deal. You have to have a ticket before “retiring.” I took a look at a retiring room but only from the outside. The door was closed. The window shutter was open. Bars on the window. I’m sure that that is a good idea but the way I saw it would take about a twenty knot wind to stir a breeze inside there. It was hot now and I didn’t expect any cold front moving in before January. That option did not look good. And a hotel room for one hundred ninety-three dollars a night wasn’t all that attractive either. “Sir, may I be of any help.”
The young man, a promoter but the only person in this manmade cavern who seemed interested in being of assistance, explained in clear English what the English speaking railway workers couldn’t get across. No trains until tomorrow morning. I would need a reservation. But that there was a night bus to Goa with sleeping accommodations and he knew the agent. Mumbai had lost its charm. I listened.
To shorten a story of heat and confusion, within an hour, I had a receipt which would act as a ticket which I purchased at a stall across from the Mumbai Chhatrapati Shivaji. I knew there was a reason I couldn’t remember the name of the railway station. Sale number two began.
Would I like to see the sights before boarding the bus? I had about three hours. I hired a cab and the young English speaker and we were on our way to the Gateway of India. There are times when you travel that you want to see what you’ve already seen and this was one of those times. The great arch, which was built to commemorate a visit by King George V and Queen Mary during the 1920s, was built on transversing arches. The open area around the arch is an area where people gather to socialize and to sell. There were several hundred people there looking for some fresh air and possibly a cool breeze off the bay.
One of the hawkers showed me an odd curio, a pair of egg-shaped pieces of magnetized steel. The huckster matched the polarity of the two “eggs,” tossed them into the air, and caught them. While the eggs were aloft, they reversed polarity and in their turning, they pushed a fraction of an inch apart. Because they now attracted each other, they slammed together and bounced apart a hundred times before you could catch them. This made a buzzing noise that would attract at least my attention. I was not in the buying mode but the novelty was interesting.
The seller wanted me to toss the eggs. I held them but didn’t throw. I didn’t feel I could catch them and if they dropped to the pavement…. In the days to come I’d look back at the why of my feelings. The trick was nothing more than tossing a golf ball a foot and a half in the air but I was sure that I couldn’t do it. But why? I think I was still running on Eastern Standard Time and the LP fumes from my entry into Mumbai.
We drove west across a neck of land to park and walk along a broad walk paralleling the crescent of Back Bay. Lights dot the walk and since it was getting on toward evening, the curve was very pretty and two or three thousand residents and I enjoyed the view and it could be that the air improved here, if not in reality, at least psychologically. We were at the edge the Arabian Sea.
Across the bay stood Malabar Hill which was topped by a park, which next on the things to see. But we made an unscheduled stop by a house where Gandhi stayed from about the time of WWI and the mid thirties. This place, although closed (it was dark now) was like a drink of water. There was no press of people. The street, although narrow, lacked fender to fender traffic. And all the houses along the street were worth looking at. We walked for about a block and then back again on the other side of the street. The houses were not ostentatious but very comfortable. This more than the peak was really a relaxing high point of the evening. There was a Jain temple which was a must and then down to the bus.
I arrived in plenty of time, paid off my guides, and met two Dutch ladies who were backpacking and on their way to Goa and then the bus came and we boarded. The bunks were over the seats and I crawled up (after several attempts, the bus was moving) and stretched out. I’m not sure but I think I awoke at the outskirts of Mumbai.
Part of the deal was that if I wanted to reserve the bunk all to myself, I’d have to pay another twelve or thirteen dollars. Well, nobody else is going to Goa and I went back to sleep. The bus stopped in any village that looked like they might have a passenger but most didn’t. It was new moon dark out there and of course, I couldn’t see any of the country. The guy who served as my fence to keep me from falling out of the bunk climbed up in about an hour. He weighed a little over two hundred fifty and didn’t snore. Then he was gone but only to be replaced by a guy of about three hundred who stayed on for a bunch of miles. I slept a little, climbing down for rest stops. It was odd but I wasn’t drinking water and hadn’t eaten anything in hours but was neither hungry nor thirsty. Sometime during the night I fell asleep; sometime I fell awake. Not restful but I could have slept on rocks.
Then dawn gave shape but no color or detail to trees and building we passed. Traveling at night or over snow covered country is no way to see what a place looks like. With each fifteen minutes I could see a little better. The trees were of a hundred varieties and many covered with vines. It rains here, which is not always the case in other parts of India. There was no rain forest, not because of lack of rain but because of no real forest. The small farms along the road were alive and while the houses looked to be returning to earth, fighting winter cold was not a problem here.
I began to watch the driving, not a relaxing activity. They drive on the left but we drove on the right because we passed everything in front of us. This looked to be a bus driver’s hell, keeping a schedule with trucks, motorbikes, cars, and anything else including busses that could use the road. Coming toward us was a stake bed truck with “Jesus” painted in yard high letters on the forward part of the box which sheltered the bed. I was either in Goa or surely approaching. The traffic became heavier and we made more stops at the villages. The driver called, “Panaji” and I had arrived, more or less. The cabbie took me to Church Square and I made my way to the Hotel Republica.
Bosco, the manager, touted the “English” bathroom (there was a commode rather than a squat toilet,) a shower (no hot water,) and stained glass. For ten bucks a night, how could I say no. Stained glass! No towels, no air conditioning other than a ceiling fan, no toilet paper, and no screens, but stained glass! The beds were rock hard which made the place absolutely perfect and I proved that by sleeping the rest of the day and the night as well. It would be in the heat of the next day that I would make a most unpleasant discovery but that’s another story.
#
The heat would be of no surprise to anyone except me. The earlier journey across northern India was done in about the last half of January and the full month of February, 1967. Sweater weather makes a coat fell good at times. October is short sleeve weather in Texas and as I walked across the paved parking lot, looking for my taxi, I certainly knew that I must now be much closer to the equator.
It seems that India society is a stack of managers. Somebody gets to tell an underling what to do and to do it now. Then underling passes the word down. Whether this parallels the cast system, I’ll learn in time but if you want to get a manager grumpy, give him a task and allow him to discover that there is no one beneath him. The buck has rolled down hill and landed in his lap. His people were not to be found. Everyone was on break.
I set my pack in the backseat and gave directions for him to take me to Victoria Terminal, which is the main railway station. Of course, they’ve changed the name since I last arrived there forty years ago but that made no difference as the driver was as old as I and we both remember the earlier name. I lowered the back windows looking for cooler air and the grump, reminding me of Charon, took his seat, glared back at the heat, and we drove along the highway to Mumbai.
I can’t remember when it began but I soon saw that the road wasn’t only a place to travel; it was a place to live. The children played at the edge of the road, the adults took up the space between the curb to about half way across the sidewalk and the remainder was a stall for selling or a shelter for living. Mile after mile there was a solid crowd. The road filled with vehicular traffic just missing each other. The taxis here use LP gas and it has an odor all their own, which mixes with the smells of two walls of people living within speaking distance of each other. They say that if you drink a glass of water in New Orleans that you are the sixth person to drink that water, since the rain fell in the river’s northern catchment near the Canadian border. Each breath I drew I’m sure had been exhaled by a half dozen people. Either that or that LP gas cooked the air before exhausting it. What a difference forty years and a half billion more people make.
In time we drew up at the station. Since it was formally named for Queen Victoria, you see architecture from a time long before this. They built big, rambling, and used the building materials’ color to make the building distinctive. I tipped the driver but I could see that his heart really rested with what intended to say to his charges, if he could find them when he got back to the airport.
No more than I walked into the dark of the building to get directions than a young man approached me to sell his services as interpreter, guide, and baggage handler. I waved him off. The station looked bigger on the inside and was naturally lighted by sunlight. It was also naturally cooled should a breeze blow through the window. Neither system worked worth a damn.
In order to be employed in either the steel industry or for the railway, you must be fluent in English. Cultural diversity is just fine for those peddling on the street but there will be no Tower of Babel when you’ve got an express train or a hot piece of steel coming at you. Now keeping in mind of my imperfect hearing plus my not having heard Indian English spoken to any extent, I could barely make out what anybody said to me. I walked from room to room and not drawing much in the way or assistance or even curiosity. Part of the problem was that it was Sunday afternoon and those (the ticket sellers) who could go home, did. “Tomorrow morning!” And furthermore I was in the wrong of the building. The young man was there again. “No thank you.” I luggage myself up a grand stairway and found some ladies who might rent me a “retiring room.” No deal. You have to have a ticket before “retiring.” I took a look at a retiring room but only from the outside. The door was closed. The window shutter was open. Bars on the window. I’m sure that that is a good idea but the way I saw it would take about a twenty knot wind to stir a breeze inside there. It was hot now and I didn’t expect any cold front moving in before January. That option did not look good. And a hotel room for one hundred ninety-three dollars a night wasn’t all that attractive either. “Sir, may I be of any help.”
The young man, a promoter but the only person in this manmade cavern who seemed interested in being of assistance, explained in clear English what the English speaking railway workers couldn’t get across. No trains until tomorrow morning. I would need a reservation. But that there was a night bus to Goa with sleeping accommodations and he knew the agent. Mumbai had lost its charm. I listened.
To shorten a story of heat and confusion, within an hour, I had a receipt which would act as a ticket which I purchased at a stall across from the Mumbai Chhatrapati Shivaji. I knew there was a reason I couldn’t remember the name of the railway station. Sale number two began.
Would I like to see the sights before boarding the bus? I had about three hours. I hired a cab and the young English speaker and we were on our way to the Gateway of India. There are times when you travel that you want to see what you’ve already seen and this was one of those times. The great arch, which was built to commemorate a visit by King George V and Queen Mary during the 1920s, was built on transversing arches. The open area around the arch is an area where people gather to socialize and to sell. There were several hundred people there looking for some fresh air and possibly a cool breeze off the bay.
One of the hawkers showed me an odd curio, a pair of egg-shaped pieces of magnetized steel. The huckster matched the polarity of the two “eggs,” tossed them into the air, and caught them. While the eggs were aloft, they reversed polarity and in their turning, they pushed a fraction of an inch apart. Because they now attracted each other, they slammed together and bounced apart a hundred times before you could catch them. This made a buzzing noise that would attract at least my attention. I was not in the buying mode but the novelty was interesting.
The seller wanted me to toss the eggs. I held them but didn’t throw. I didn’t feel I could catch them and if they dropped to the pavement…. In the days to come I’d look back at the why of my feelings. The trick was nothing more than tossing a golf ball a foot and a half in the air but I was sure that I couldn’t do it. But why? I think I was still running on Eastern Standard Time and the LP fumes from my entry into Mumbai.
We drove west across a neck of land to park and walk along a broad walk paralleling the crescent of Back Bay. Lights dot the walk and since it was getting on toward evening, the curve was very pretty and two or three thousand residents and I enjoyed the view and it could be that the air improved here, if not in reality, at least psychologically. We were at the edge the Arabian Sea.
Across the bay stood Malabar Hill which was topped by a park, which next on the things to see. But we made an unscheduled stop by a house where Gandhi stayed from about the time of WWI and the mid thirties. This place, although closed (it was dark now) was like a drink of water. There was no press of people. The street, although narrow, lacked fender to fender traffic. And all the houses along the street were worth looking at. We walked for about a block and then back again on the other side of the street. The houses were not ostentatious but very comfortable. This more than the peak was really a relaxing high point of the evening. There was a Jain temple which was a must and then down to the bus.
I arrived in plenty of time, paid off my guides, and met two Dutch ladies who were backpacking and on their way to Goa and then the bus came and we boarded. The bunks were over the seats and I crawled up (after several attempts, the bus was moving) and stretched out. I’m not sure but I think I awoke at the outskirts of Mumbai.
Part of the deal was that if I wanted to reserve the bunk all to myself, I’d have to pay another twelve or thirteen dollars. Well, nobody else is going to Goa and I went back to sleep. The bus stopped in any village that looked like they might have a passenger but most didn’t. It was new moon dark out there and of course, I couldn’t see any of the country. The guy who served as my fence to keep me from falling out of the bunk climbed up in about an hour. He weighed a little over two hundred fifty and didn’t snore. Then he was gone but only to be replaced by a guy of about three hundred who stayed on for a bunch of miles. I slept a little, climbing down for rest stops. It was odd but I wasn’t drinking water and hadn’t eaten anything in hours but was neither hungry nor thirsty. Sometime during the night I fell asleep; sometime I fell awake. Not restful but I could have slept on rocks.
Then dawn gave shape but no color or detail to trees and building we passed. Traveling at night or over snow covered country is no way to see what a place looks like. With each fifteen minutes I could see a little better. The trees were of a hundred varieties and many covered with vines. It rains here, which is not always the case in other parts of India. There was no rain forest, not because of lack of rain but because of no real forest. The small farms along the road were alive and while the houses looked to be returning to earth, fighting winter cold was not a problem here.
I began to watch the driving, not a relaxing activity. They drive on the left but we drove on the right because we passed everything in front of us. This looked to be a bus driver’s hell, keeping a schedule with trucks, motorbikes, cars, and anything else including busses that could use the road. Coming toward us was a stake bed truck with “Jesus” painted in yard high letters on the forward part of the box which sheltered the bed. I was either in Goa or surely approaching. The traffic became heavier and we made more stops at the villages. The driver called, “Panaji” and I had arrived, more or less. The cabbie took me to Church Square and I made my way to the Hotel Republica.
Bosco, the manager, touted the “English” bathroom (there was a commode rather than a squat toilet,) a shower (no hot water,) and stained glass. For ten bucks a night, how could I say no. Stained glass! No towels, no air conditioning other than a ceiling fan, no toilet paper, and no screens, but stained glass! The beds were rock hard which made the place absolutely perfect and I proved that by sleeping the rest of the day and the night as well. It would be in the heat of the next day that I would make a most unpleasant discovery but that’s another story.
#
Well, I Had to Get Down Somehow
Well, I Had to Get Down Somehow
So there I was at 41,000 feet and in the dark. Not too dark. The seat-back monitors gave a little light. The psychiatrist and I visited beneath the roar of the engines. I asked him about Moslem women’s covering vs. not covering. Some of the ladies were as conventionally dressed as any woman walking down the aisle of a supermarket in heartland America. One was swathed in scarves and clothes, head to foot. The only part you could see of her was from the bridge of her nose to her eyebrows. If you travel in Pakistan and Iraq, some women totally cover themselves, looking like black ghosts. All that breaks the black on black is a bit of white mosquito netting covering the window, allowing a way for her to see out. He explained that to what degree a person was to follow the Law was up to the individual. Outside Iran as well as the other more conservative parts of the Islamic world, there is less stress on public taste. Before the revolution in Iran, I remember Tehran in 1967 as being a very liberal way of life. The women were Fifth Avenue fashionable. Your main concern then was getting across the street and living to tell about it.
He was good enough to tune me into my choice of movies, Pirates of the Caribbean, the first in the series. The sell there was a presentation of what the public wants to think about rather than what the public has to think about. When people are stressed they revert to child-like choices. Shirley Temple and the Dionne Quintuplets were the stars of the Thirties. “Everything I Ever Needed to Know in Life, I Learned on my Way to Kindergarten” and Jonathan Livingston Seagull came in the later part of the century. There has always been a sector of the entertainment market for MGM and Bollywood. The choreography and effects were good. After a while I got the agendas confused but I wondered if any of it could hold my interest, which it did. I watched till the kiss and the parting.
There were “classics” to choose from. Father of the Bride for one. My seatmate watched Roman Holiday. Having seen it a half-dozen times, I passed but would glance over at his screen from time to time remembering what was happening.
Of course I tried to sleep but don’t remember losing the train of events which amounted to little more than waiting. Then the psychiatrist and the fellow who wrote the essay, decided to switch seats. The essayist had two seats to himself to the right of the aisle and since the armrest can be raised, the two seats made a bed, albeit a short one. So the trade was made and I found a young man dressed in traditional black with an over smock-like cassock covering him down to about his knees. In India many women wear an over covering much the same but out of lighter material and in every color there is.
The new fellow was clever electronically. He checked on Makkah’s direction then rubbed his face from top down as if washing up. He listened to some music – parts of the Koran sung. Then he checked if we had changed our direction in relation to Makkah and then he watched a snatch of a movie all the while changing his position in his seat. He “washed” his face again as he recited beneath his breath. After which he curled up, put his head on my shoulder, closed his eyes, and tried to sleep. No drooling. But in order to go to sleep, he needed to be still and that he couldn’t do. He read papers. The Koran was no where in sight. And these activities he repeated randomly over and over. After several hours, the psychiatrist awoke and traded back.
The psychiatrist scored a thick beefsteak with potatoes. I asked him where he got it. He said the essayist gave it to him. I think that once he went back to his seat, he decided that he was hungry and bugged the stewardess until she gave him something to eat…which happened to be the food overage for first class. Of course he wasn’t that hungry so he gave it to the psychiatrist. About forty-five minutes later there’s a row, starboard, aft. The psychiatrist reported that the essayist had dropped off to sleep and the stewardess asked if he still wanted whatever is was that he last requested thereby waking him up. He quieted down after a while and we looked at the map of Europe and saw that we had clipped the lower part of Norway, had flown over Jutland, and were heading for Prussia. Makkah had slipped more abeam. And the cheering thought was that this night would not last much longer.
I had been told by the public health lady in New York to flex my legs, to get up and walk around. The distance to the lavatory wasn’t really a hike and when I looked over the faces of the other passengers, that really didn’t make me feel any better. If you traveled long distances by bus before the advent of air conditioning, the company looked something like that. Travel weariness has its own cosmetic kit. I didn’t look any better. When I took my seat again, I looked out that far window to see if I could see the wing. Dark.
I asked the psychiatrist how he happened to choose psychiatry. He liked the hours. I asked him about some illness or another and he fished out a well-worn little book that described at least the more common maladies. First was the name. Then came a brief overview of the illness. No treatment was prescribed. To the left of the name was a number. He explained that this was the problem’s id number and they entered that code into the computer and the health workers were paid by the time and code they entered. I had one ailment in mind but as usual when I look up anything, I get distracted to the point of wondering what it was I was going to look up. In this case, I checked out the sex problems to see if there were any that I had not experienced and then afterward I read up on ADS. I thought I had got it about right and showed him the book. “Have you encountered any of this lately?” I asked. He grinned but said nothing. That diagnosis would not go into the data bank.
Day did light the airplane wing and with a breakfast, I tuned into the view from the plane’s nose. The belly camera malfunctioned. And not surprising I saw cloud and while the map was not all that detailed, I think were over the western part of the old USSR. Somewhere down there was the Caspian Sea. The inland sea would fall into a like classification as Newfoundland but the clouds get in the way.
Then the announcement came and the pressure built in the ears and I watched the clouds on the monitor. The lower we flew, the more individuality the cloud formations displayed and between the breaks another color of blue – the Persian Gulf. We wouldn’t have to watch it in the gauche colors on the map. When the land showed up, the water looked even better. Color went from a deep blue to a turquoise to a sandy gold. Looked like a good place to go swimming unless there was something down there that bit. We all looked forward to getting off the plane.
Having left New York late and not picking up enough jet stream help, we still ran well behind time. There should have been a two hour plus layover in Abu Dhabi. I wondered if the flight to Mumbai had already left. The thousand dollar a night hotels are famous but I’m not and I have no expense account. In another life. Both the psychiatrist and the essayist would be changing planes and going on to Karachi. I think that most of the passengers were Pakistani. And so we tried to remember what we brought with us a day or a night ago or whatever you refer to this 18 hours of living in the tube that chopped into two days. I watched the monitor. We flew past the beaches and I could see the runway ahead.
Dubai can’t grow fast enough. I can’t say what was happening downtown but the airport is still in the shell. There are buildings but little is finished.
What happened next was almost a walk down memory lane. We came down a ramp which had been pushed up to the fuselage and walked across the tarmac to a waiting bus. We were walking on the ground like we did in the pre-security days. I don’t think that they let you put your foot on the ground in Nome.
They divided Karachi and Mumbai passengers and the planes had waited. I took a quick look around the horizon. Midland/Odessa has had a wet year and so there is more mesquite with foliage than what was supposed to be growing around the airport. You want trees? Somebody in Abu Dhabi will surely sell you some trees. The more pressing matter was re-boarding. Then up and away and in a short time, pressure again built in my ears and this time, I looked out again a far window at a shanty town. No doubt about, subdivisions do not allow Beijing blue tarps to stop rain and sun or to become a permanent part of the structure. The edge of the settlement reached into the haze on mid-afternoon.
Then the jolt of touchdown and there endeth the longest flight in miles and duration that I’ve ever experienced. I was most happy to deplane. I would pass through a utilitarian air terminal, Socialist gray walls with money changers’ desks stationed along the baseboard. I’d buy a prepaid taxi ride of at least a dozen miles, maybe more. But for the moment I lugged a pack and briefcase toward some glass doors that could use some Windex. Just on the other side of the glass was where what I remember and what is real at this moment meet head on. From my point of view, just beyond the doors lay “the Real India.”
#
So there I was at 41,000 feet and in the dark. Not too dark. The seat-back monitors gave a little light. The psychiatrist and I visited beneath the roar of the engines. I asked him about Moslem women’s covering vs. not covering. Some of the ladies were as conventionally dressed as any woman walking down the aisle of a supermarket in heartland America. One was swathed in scarves and clothes, head to foot. The only part you could see of her was from the bridge of her nose to her eyebrows. If you travel in Pakistan and Iraq, some women totally cover themselves, looking like black ghosts. All that breaks the black on black is a bit of white mosquito netting covering the window, allowing a way for her to see out. He explained that to what degree a person was to follow the Law was up to the individual. Outside Iran as well as the other more conservative parts of the Islamic world, there is less stress on public taste. Before the revolution in Iran, I remember Tehran in 1967 as being a very liberal way of life. The women were Fifth Avenue fashionable. Your main concern then was getting across the street and living to tell about it.
He was good enough to tune me into my choice of movies, Pirates of the Caribbean, the first in the series. The sell there was a presentation of what the public wants to think about rather than what the public has to think about. When people are stressed they revert to child-like choices. Shirley Temple and the Dionne Quintuplets were the stars of the Thirties. “Everything I Ever Needed to Know in Life, I Learned on my Way to Kindergarten” and Jonathan Livingston Seagull came in the later part of the century. There has always been a sector of the entertainment market for MGM and Bollywood. The choreography and effects were good. After a while I got the agendas confused but I wondered if any of it could hold my interest, which it did. I watched till the kiss and the parting.
There were “classics” to choose from. Father of the Bride for one. My seatmate watched Roman Holiday. Having seen it a half-dozen times, I passed but would glance over at his screen from time to time remembering what was happening.
Of course I tried to sleep but don’t remember losing the train of events which amounted to little more than waiting. Then the psychiatrist and the fellow who wrote the essay, decided to switch seats. The essayist had two seats to himself to the right of the aisle and since the armrest can be raised, the two seats made a bed, albeit a short one. So the trade was made and I found a young man dressed in traditional black with an over smock-like cassock covering him down to about his knees. In India many women wear an over covering much the same but out of lighter material and in every color there is.
The new fellow was clever electronically. He checked on Makkah’s direction then rubbed his face from top down as if washing up. He listened to some music – parts of the Koran sung. Then he checked if we had changed our direction in relation to Makkah and then he watched a snatch of a movie all the while changing his position in his seat. He “washed” his face again as he recited beneath his breath. After which he curled up, put his head on my shoulder, closed his eyes, and tried to sleep. No drooling. But in order to go to sleep, he needed to be still and that he couldn’t do. He read papers. The Koran was no where in sight. And these activities he repeated randomly over and over. After several hours, the psychiatrist awoke and traded back.
The psychiatrist scored a thick beefsteak with potatoes. I asked him where he got it. He said the essayist gave it to him. I think that once he went back to his seat, he decided that he was hungry and bugged the stewardess until she gave him something to eat…which happened to be the food overage for first class. Of course he wasn’t that hungry so he gave it to the psychiatrist. About forty-five minutes later there’s a row, starboard, aft. The psychiatrist reported that the essayist had dropped off to sleep and the stewardess asked if he still wanted whatever is was that he last requested thereby waking him up. He quieted down after a while and we looked at the map of Europe and saw that we had clipped the lower part of Norway, had flown over Jutland, and were heading for Prussia. Makkah had slipped more abeam. And the cheering thought was that this night would not last much longer.
I had been told by the public health lady in New York to flex my legs, to get up and walk around. The distance to the lavatory wasn’t really a hike and when I looked over the faces of the other passengers, that really didn’t make me feel any better. If you traveled long distances by bus before the advent of air conditioning, the company looked something like that. Travel weariness has its own cosmetic kit. I didn’t look any better. When I took my seat again, I looked out that far window to see if I could see the wing. Dark.
I asked the psychiatrist how he happened to choose psychiatry. He liked the hours. I asked him about some illness or another and he fished out a well-worn little book that described at least the more common maladies. First was the name. Then came a brief overview of the illness. No treatment was prescribed. To the left of the name was a number. He explained that this was the problem’s id number and they entered that code into the computer and the health workers were paid by the time and code they entered. I had one ailment in mind but as usual when I look up anything, I get distracted to the point of wondering what it was I was going to look up. In this case, I checked out the sex problems to see if there were any that I had not experienced and then afterward I read up on ADS. I thought I had got it about right and showed him the book. “Have you encountered any of this lately?” I asked. He grinned but said nothing. That diagnosis would not go into the data bank.
Day did light the airplane wing and with a breakfast, I tuned into the view from the plane’s nose. The belly camera malfunctioned. And not surprising I saw cloud and while the map was not all that detailed, I think were over the western part of the old USSR. Somewhere down there was the Caspian Sea. The inland sea would fall into a like classification as Newfoundland but the clouds get in the way.
Then the announcement came and the pressure built in the ears and I watched the clouds on the monitor. The lower we flew, the more individuality the cloud formations displayed and between the breaks another color of blue – the Persian Gulf. We wouldn’t have to watch it in the gauche colors on the map. When the land showed up, the water looked even better. Color went from a deep blue to a turquoise to a sandy gold. Looked like a good place to go swimming unless there was something down there that bit. We all looked forward to getting off the plane.
Having left New York late and not picking up enough jet stream help, we still ran well behind time. There should have been a two hour plus layover in Abu Dhabi. I wondered if the flight to Mumbai had already left. The thousand dollar a night hotels are famous but I’m not and I have no expense account. In another life. Both the psychiatrist and the essayist would be changing planes and going on to Karachi. I think that most of the passengers were Pakistani. And so we tried to remember what we brought with us a day or a night ago or whatever you refer to this 18 hours of living in the tube that chopped into two days. I watched the monitor. We flew past the beaches and I could see the runway ahead.
Dubai can’t grow fast enough. I can’t say what was happening downtown but the airport is still in the shell. There are buildings but little is finished.
What happened next was almost a walk down memory lane. We came down a ramp which had been pushed up to the fuselage and walked across the tarmac to a waiting bus. We were walking on the ground like we did in the pre-security days. I don’t think that they let you put your foot on the ground in Nome.
They divided Karachi and Mumbai passengers and the planes had waited. I took a quick look around the horizon. Midland/Odessa has had a wet year and so there is more mesquite with foliage than what was supposed to be growing around the airport. You want trees? Somebody in Abu Dhabi will surely sell you some trees. The more pressing matter was re-boarding. Then up and away and in a short time, pressure again built in my ears and this time, I looked out again a far window at a shanty town. No doubt about, subdivisions do not allow Beijing blue tarps to stop rain and sun or to become a permanent part of the structure. The edge of the settlement reached into the haze on mid-afternoon.
Then the jolt of touchdown and there endeth the longest flight in miles and duration that I’ve ever experienced. I was most happy to deplane. I would pass through a utilitarian air terminal, Socialist gray walls with money changers’ desks stationed along the baseboard. I’d buy a prepaid taxi ride of at least a dozen miles, maybe more. But for the moment I lugged a pack and briefcase toward some glass doors that could use some Windex. Just on the other side of the glass was where what I remember and what is real at this moment meet head on. From my point of view, just beyond the doors lay “the Real India.”
#
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